submitted by /u/Naurgul [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

“Diffusion models beat GANs”. While true, the statement comes with several ifs and buts, not to say that the math behind diffusion models is not for the faint of heart. Alas, GLIDE, an OpenAI paper from last December took a big step towards making it true in every sense. Specifically, it introduced a new guidance method for diffusion models that produces higher quality images than even DALL-E, which uses expensive CLIP reranking. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, GLIDE models can be fine-tuned for various downstream tasks such a inpainting and and text-based editing. As for the details, let’s dive in, shall we? Full summary: https://t.me/casual_gan/289 Blog post: https://www.casualganpapers.com/faster-diffusion-models-text-to-image-classifier-free-guidance/GLIDE-explained.html GLIDE arxiv / code Join the discord community and follow on Twitter for weekly AI paper summaries! submitted by /u/KirillTheMunchKing [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

“Diffusion models beat GANs”. While true, the statement comes with several ifs and buts, not to say that the math behind diffusion models is not for the faint of heart. Alas, GLIDE, an OpenAI paper from last December took a big step towards making it true in every sense. Specifically, it introduced a new guidance method for diffusion models that produces higher quality images than even DALL-E, which uses expensive CLIP reranking. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, GLIDE models can be fine-tuned for various downstream tasks such a inpainting and and text-based editing. As for the details, let’s dive in, shall we? Full summary: https://t.me/casual_gan/289 Blog post: https://www.casualganpapers.com/faster-diffusion-models-text-to-image-classifier-free-guidance/GLIDE-explained.html GLIDE arxiv / code Join the discord community and follow on Twitter for weekly AI paper summaries! submitted by /u/KirillTheMunchKing [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

A Blaschke product is a function that is the product of Blaschke factors, functions of the form b(z; a) = |a|  (a – z) / a (1 – a*z) where the complex number a lies inside the unit circle and a* is the complex conjugate of a. I wanted to plot Blaschke products with random […] Random Blaschke products and Mathematica binding first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 2 min )

I'm not going to make this vague. Specifically I'm seeing a lot of comments related to Elon Musk saying he's going to remove bots from Twitter. There's a lot of speculation on how this could be done with comments suggesting a captcha-based system for every post/reply (or maybe every action?). More specifically people seem fixated on captcha systems that can't be botted. (Ignore for a moment the accessibility issues and audio fallbacks that might be required). I'm aware that Tesla transitioned to using more massive synthetic datasets for training, so this might be somewhat outdated. That said they do have a lot of data collection of new real world data from their sensors. This has me curious on the estimated value of large-scale captcha systems directly tied with a company that might need large-scale labeling services. I'm sure researchers here have run numbers on labeling services and how to best to utilize them. (Goes without saying the prices vary quite a bit and cover a wide range of tasks from simple bounding boxes to relatively expensive polygons for semantic labeling. For example just as a reference: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/data-labeling/pricing ). Most services don't list prices for like 500 million tasks which makes sense given that's a lot. A captcha system would have independent users redoing tasks multiple times to find baselines, but in general it would average to find a ground truth label. This redundant work isn't wasted in this sense as it can find say difficult scenarios and refine labels. I could naively say 500 million / (10 USD/1000 tasks) = 5 million USD a day not counting server costs and development. Not super scientific though and it seems high. (I have doubts on if gathering 500 million samples of value a day to even get labeled is realistic). I digress, what would you say is the hypothetical value of such a system using short captcha tasks? submitted by /u/Sirisian [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

AI21 Labs’ Modular Reasoning, Knowledge and Language (MRKL, pronounced “miracle”) system – and Jurassic-X includes one or more language models, and augment them with external knowledge sources as well as symbolic reasoning experts that can handle tasks that lie beyond the reach of neural models. There are 55 different task-specific modules that MRKL currently supports. If the router is unsure which module is best, it calls on Jurassic-1. Jurassic also helps compose the contextual language around MRKL’s response. This allows MRKL to give factual answers with up-to-date information instead of being limited to its training data alone, and gives it the ability to carry out a much wider range of NLP tasks as compared to other LLM's like Google's PaLM or OpenAI's GPT-3 AI21 blog and whitepaper here Video here submitted by /u/SlightSituation [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm working on an Edge ML product where we train models in the cloud and then run them on a device using tensorRT. We're considering switching to using the Nvidia TAO Toolkit for training. If you've used TAO, do you like it? Is it limiting? Our alternative is training in pytorch and then converting to ONNX and then tensorRT separately. Thanks! submitted by /u/linguistBot [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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https://youtu.be/povBDxUn1VQ Automatic curriculum generation is one of the most promising avenues for Reinforcement Learning today. Multiple approaches have been proposed, each with their own set of advantages and drawbacks. This paper presents ACCEL, which takes the next step into the direction of constructing curricula for multi-capable agents. ACCEL combines the adversarial adaptiveness of regret-based sampling methods with the capabilities of level-editing, usually found in Evolutionary Methods. ​ OUTLINE: 0:00 - Intro & Demonstration 3:50 - Paper overview 5:20 - The ACCEL algorithm 15:25 - Looking at the pseudocode 23:10 - Approximating regret 33:45 - Experimental results 40:00 - Discussion & Comments ​ Website: https://accelagent.github.io Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01302 submitted by /u/ykilcher [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello hivemind. Context I am working on streamlined design strategies for (manual) neural architecture design. I recently came across a simple, receptive field-based strategy that allows me to reliably improve the architectures of some SOTA models like EfficientNet by up +1.5% top1-accuracy.That being said, there seems to be a trade-off between performance and number of computations I put into the same number of parameters.Basically, the more computationally expensive the architectural change is, the better the performance turns out to be. The number of parameters does not change in the process. The model becomes therefore more parameter efficient but computationally less efficient, which you could consider a somewhat Pyrrhic victory. Now to my question: Is there use for parameter efficiency in models when it does not also coincide with computational efficiency? Is there any literature on the topic you can recommend? submitted by /u/KrakenInAJar [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

So far I've only seen feature importance calculated on one model/ training set at a time, However, with cross validation there are many models built on different training sets, how do you calculate feature importance in this case? Just do it on one model? Or calculate feature importance for each model and somehow aggregate it (e.g., by averaging)? submitted by /u/Comprehensive-Egg707 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hello, I wrote the blog post about text-conditional image generation using diffusion models (including DALLE-2). Let me know what you think! ​ https://sangyun884.github.io/recent-trends-in-diffusion-based-text-conditional/ submitted by /u/Impressive-Mirror430 [link] [comments]

Hey r/MachineLearning, Nir from DagsHub here, and I'm thrilled to share a project we're launching today that will hopefully unlock GitHub Actions for ML. GitHub Actions solved a DevOps burden many of us felt by providing an easy-to-configure CI/CD tool to build, test, and deploy pipelines. However, when it comes to ML pipelines, and working with data, models, and experimentation in mind, the workflow is not as well defined and can get tricky to implement. DagsHub is kind of like GitHub for machine learning, which extends what GitHub did for code management to track data, models, experiments, and data pipelines. We do this by integrating awesome open source tools like DVC, MLflow, Label Studio, and more. One of our most requested features was a deeper integration with GitHub that will let…  ( 1 min )

Hi folks, our ICLR 2022 Blog post on "The 37 Implementation Details of Proximal Policy Optimization" is live 😀 Our post makes it easier to understand the nitty-gritty PPO's implementations with 1) 🎥 video tutorials 2) 📜 detailed references and explanations 3) ⌨️ really simple code Here are the links: Official URL: https://iclr-blog-track.github.io/2022/03/25/ppo-implementation-details/ Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/vwxyzjn/status/1518589115163369472 OpenReview link:https://openreview.net/forum?id=Hl6jCqIp2j GitHub repo: https://github.com/vwxyzjn/ppo-implementation-details YouTube tutorial on PPO: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD80i8An1OEHhcxclwq8jOMam0m0M9dQ_ I am the main author & feel free to ask me anything here. submitted by /u/vwxyzjn [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hey, 🤗 Hugging Face is offering a workshop (June 6) for instructors of machine learning and data science who would like to learn how the open-source ecosystem can be used in their classes. After this workshop, you will know how to: 🧑‍💻 Teach Transformers models & famous ML libraries 🤖 Onboard students to the Hub to build/host projects 💾 Publish models/datasets in a few lines of code During the workshop, you will be invited to join the following page for a better understanding of our open-source solutions: https://huggingface.co/teach For more details about the workshop content, visit: https://hf.co/teaching Feel free to register here:) submitted by /u/VioletteLep [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

It could be pictures of anything, except of humans. But it would be better if it were not focused on a single topic like dog images. submitted by /u/TheManveru [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

TL;DR: Download dataset of labelled Web pages, WebTraversalLibrary for scripting web interactions Hi everyone! Our group at Klarna has been putting in a ton of work into deep learning for the Web over the past few years and we've made a couple of useful resources available for the research community. You might find them interesting if you're looking for new ideas for spare-time or even post-grad research projects. We've open-sourced a dataset of about 50k labeled product web pages from roughly 8000 distinct e-commerce merchants, available as MHTML and WebTraversalLibrary clones (see next point :) ), along with the corresponding screenshots. Not all of the MHTMLs render correctly, but the ones that do also have screenshots in a corresponding dataset for CV applications. You can find doc…  ( 2 min )

Just like Eleuther did with GPT3? submitted by /u/invertedpassion [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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Does anyone know where chatbots specifically the ones on Chai get their information? This one knew what meta-analysis was and knew who the main character of a show was I do not believe the bots are real people based on both the information I've seen and my experience with them glitching out Plus occam's razor yk Im guessing they can use google or something but it's odd because they clearly don't have access to the time submitted by /u/Shadowfax42- [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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(I have no experience with photoshop) submitted by /u/xXNOdrugsForMEXx [link] [comments]

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is there a way to access any of openAI APIs if it's not avalable in my country? submitted by /u/dogaryy [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hi, I am having some trouble with a LSTM problem regarding walk forward validation in my LSTM. The problem is described in this stackoverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71990833/using-predictions-instead-of-observed-values-in-walk-forward-validation-in-lstm If any one could help me that would be much appreciated submitted by /u/magnussendjoko [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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The last few years have seen rapid growth in the field of natural language processing (NLP) using transformer deep learning architectures. With its Transformers open-source library and machine learning (ML) platform, Hugging Face makes transfer learning and the latest transformer models accessible to the global AI community. This can reduce the time needed for data […]  ( 8 min )

Nordic Aviation Capital (NAC) is the industry’s leading regional aircraft lessor, serving almost 70 airlines in approximately 45 countries worldwide. In 2021, NAC turned to AWS to help it use artificial intelligence (AI) to further improve its leasing operations and reduce its reliance on manual labor. With Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, NAC built an AI […]  ( 5 min )

MIT researchers can now estimate how much information data are likely to contain, in a more accurate and scalable way than previous methods.  ( 6 min )

Researchers have developed a technique that enables a robot to learn a new pick-and-place task with only a handful of human demonstrations.  ( 7 min )

SimpleGrid is a simple gridworld environment for OpenAI gym. It is easy to use and customise and it is intended to offer an environment for quick testing and prototyping different RL algorithms. I developed this environment by taking inspiration from the FrozenLake environment and gym-minigrid. Check it out at: https://github.com/damat-le/gym-simplegrid ​ https://i.redd.it/prqd7muujqv81.gif submitted by /u/damat-le [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, some newer CPU's (Apple M1, Intel Alder Lake) have started using a hybrid CPU topology. I.e. the CPU consists of some P-cores (high performance cores) and E-cores (slower 'eco' cores). I personally do not own such a CPU yet but I'm considering upgrading to one soon, so I am looking for experiences of people with such a CPU on training reinforcement models. Does everything work as expected? Are there annoyances? I'm using Ray Tune + RLlib in which I assign a single core per trial. In this case I'm expecting that trials running on E-cores will simply run (much) slower than those running on P-cores. In case a single trial gets assigned both a P-core and an E-core, I do expect a serious slow-down. These are all guesses really, so I'm looking for people with actual experience here. Thanks. submitted by /u/katsu9 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hey everyone, I managed to implement the policy iteration from Sutton & Barto, 2018 on the FrozenLake-v1 and wanted to do the same now Taxi-v3 environment. My code has been running now for 45min so I guess there is something wrong, but I can't wrap my head around what it could be. Would appreciate some input on what I need to change so that it will work. Please see my code here: ```[python] import gym # openAi gym import torch import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from tqdm import trange # progressbar torch.manual_seed(4) env = gym.make('Taxi-v3') def policy_evaluation(env: gym.Env, policy: torch.Tensor, gamma: float, threshold: float): V = torch.zeros(env.observation_space.n) delta = float("inf") while delta >= threshold: V_tmp = torch.empty(env.observation_space.n) for state in range(…  ( 1 min )

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Hey there! We're happy to announce the launch of the Hugging Face Deep Reinforcement Learning class! 🤗 👉 Register here https://forms.gle/oXAeRgLW4qZvUZeu9 In this free course, you will: 📖 Study Deep Reinforcement Learning in theory and practice. 🧑‍💻 Learn to use famous Deep RL libraries such as Stable Baselines3, RL Baselines3 Zoo, and RLlib. 🤖 Train agents in unique environments with SnowballFight, Huggy the Doggo 🐶, and classical ones such as Space Invaders and PyBullet. 💾 Publish your trained agents in one line of code to the Hub. But also download powerful agents from the community. 🏆 Participate in challenges where you will evaluate your agents against other teams. 🖌️🎨 Learn to share your environments made with Unity and Godot. 👉 Register here https://forms.gle/oXAeRgLW4qZvUZeu9 📚 The syllabus: https://github.com/huggingface/deep-rl-class https://preview.redd.it/b409a9sscov81.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ebdfa10c220b5a3dec17894bc0f955ed9d8f7634 If you have questions and feedback, I would love to answer them, Thanks, submitted by /u/cranthir_ [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I'm wondering if I could train the state-based locomotion well from the scratch. In my case, I trained SAC agent and It showed divergence of the q function. I think the cause is the unscaled vector input. Before the trouble shooting, I want to ask someone trained agent in this environment. Thank you for reading. https://github.com/deepmind/dm_control/tree/main/dm_control/locomotion submitted by /u/Spiritual_Fig3632 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I started off with OpenAI's mountain car, and I don't know where to even start. I got the setup working with the environment, but now have no idea how to train it. How do I learn to code for RL? Every tutorial I have seen so far has implemented Q Learning algorithms completely with little explanation. I looked at the solved code and it doesn't make sense to me. How should I prepare before I go into OpenAI? submitted by /u/TrepidationTD [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Posted by Cat Armato and Callan Hajosy, Program Managers The 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022) kicks off this week, bringing together researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers and students alike to discuss and explore the rapidly advancing field of deep learning. Entirely virtual this year, ICLR 2022 offers conference and workshop tracks that present some of the latest research in deep learning and its applications to areas ranging from computer vision, speech recognition and text understanding to robotics, computational biology, and more. As a Platinum Sponsor of ICLR 2022 and Champion DEI Action Fund contributor, Google will have a robust presence with nearly 100 accepted publications and extensive participation on organizing committees and in workshops…  ( 12 min )

The previous post explained how to define a projective plane over a field F. Now let’s look at how we do geometry in a projective plane. Definitions We have a definition of points from the other post: a point is a triple (a, b, c) of elements of F, with not all elements equal to […] Projective duality first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 3 min )

Given a field F, finite or infinite, you can construct a projective plane over F by starting with pairs of elements of F and adding “points at infinity,” one point for each direction. Motivation: Bézout’s theorem A few days ago I mentioned Bézout’s theorem as an example of a simple theorem that rests on complex […] Finite projective planes first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 4 min )

Picture a person walking in a park by a pond. The surrounding environment contains a number of moving objects that change the quality of the environment: clouds moving to hide the sun, altering the quality of light; ducks gliding across the pond, causing its surface to ripple; people walking along a path, their images reflecting […] The post PPE: A fast and provably efficient RL algorithm for exogenous noise appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 9 min )

When brainstorming a scene to best showcase the groundbreaking capabilities of the Omniverse platform, some NVIDIA artists turned to a cherished memory: enjoying ramen together in a mom-and-pop shop down a side street in Tokyo. Simmering pots of noodles, steaming dumplings, buzzing kitchen appliances, warm ambient lighting and glistening black ledger stools. These were all Read article > The post Let Me Shoyu How It’s Done: Creating the NVIDIA Omniverse Ramen Shop appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 4 min )

A paper released today describes in the greatest detail to date the atmospheres on distant planets. Seeking the origins of what’s in and beyond the Milky Way, researchers surveyed 25 exoplanets, bodies that orbit stars far beyond our solar system. Specifically, they studied hot Jupiters, the largest and thus easiest to detect exoplanets, many sweltering Read article > The post Stellar Weather: Researchers Describe the Skies of Exoplanets appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 4 min )

At some point, we’ve all used Google translate, Microsoft,DeepL or Bing translator to impress our friends/colleagues who speak a different…  ( 4 min )

Figure 1: Summary of our recommendations for when a practitioner should BC and various imitation learning style methods, and when they should use offline RL approaches. Offline reinforcement learning allows learning policies from previously collected data, which has profound implications for applying RL in domains where running trial-and-error learning is impractical or dangerous, such as safety-critical settings like autonomous driving or medical treatment planning. In such scenarios, online exploration is simply too risky, but offline RL methods can learn effective policies from logged data collected by humans or heuristically designed controllers. Prior learning-based control methods have also approached learning from existing data as imitation learning: if the data is generally “goo…  ( 11 min )

Despite it's immense popularity in academia, it's surprisingly difficult to download the ImageNet Object Localization dataset. As far as I can tell this is due to legal issues -- no single entity owns the copyright to the images, so no entity can host the whole dataset. The result is that if you want to use ImageNet you're forced to either manually scrape a million URLs (requiring both cpu time, your time, and imposing costs on a million unsuspecting websites), know somebody who has already done that, or fetch it from a legally questionable source. So I have a couple questions: Is the owner of the ImageNet dataset on Kaggle performing a selfless public service, thanklessly accepting legal liability to make ImageNet more accessible? Or is she protected (e.g. by fair use)? Is she required to accept DMCA requests? If I'd like to share ImageNet (I've recently downloaded it and processed it to be ~10 GB, which seems like a helpful thing to share), is there any legally safe path for me to do this? submitted by /u/you-get-an-upvote [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

This is a place to share machine learning research papers, journals, and articles that you're reading this week. If it relates to what you're researching, by all means elaborate and give us your insight, otherwise it could just be an interesting paper you've read. Please try to provide some insight from your understanding and please don't post things which are present in wiki. Preferably you should link the arxiv page (not the PDF, you can easily access the PDF from the summary page but not the other way around) or any other pertinent links. Previous weeks : 1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-80 81-90 91-100 101-110 111-120 121-130 131-140 Week 1 Week 11 Week 21 Week 31 Week 41 Week 51 Week 61 Week 71 Week 81 Week 91 Week 101 Week 111 Week 121 Week 131 Week 2 Week 12 Week 22 Week 32 Week 42 Week 52 Week 62 Week 72 Week 82 Week 92 Week 102 Week 112 Week 122 Week 132 Week 3 Week 13 Week 23 Week 33 Week 43 Week 53 Week 63 Week 73 Week 83 Week 93 Week 103 Week 113 Week 123 Week 133 Week 4 Week 14 Week 24 Week 34 Week 44 Week 54 Week 64 Week 74 Week 84 Week 94 Week 104 Week 114 Week 124 Week 134 Week 5 Week 15 Week 25 Week 35 Week 45 Week 55 Week 65 Week 75 Week 85 Week 95 Week 105 Week 115 Week 125 Week 135 Week 6 Week 16 Week 26 Week 36 Week 46 Week 56 Week 66 Week 76 Week 86 Week 96 Week 106 Week 116 Week 126 Week 7 Week 17 Week 27 Week 37 Week 47 Week 57 Week 67 Week 77 Week 87 Week 97 Week 107 Week 117 Week 127 Week 8 Week 18 Week 28 Week 38 Week 48 Week 58 Week 68 Week 78 Week 88 Week 98 Week 108 Week 118 Week 128 Week 9 Week 19 Week 29 Week 39 Week 49 Week 59 Week 69 Week 79 Week 89 Week 99 Week 109 Week 119 Week 129 Week 10 Week 20 Week 30 Week 40 Week 50 Week 60 Week 70 Week 80 Week 90 Week 100 Week 110 Week 120 Week 130 Most upvoted papers two weeks ago: /u/CatalyzeX_code_bot: Paper link /u/lauren_v2: paper Besides that, there are no rules, have fun. submitted by /u/ML_WAYR_bot [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Please post your questions here instead of creating a new thread. Encourage others who create new posts for questions to post here instead! Thread will stay alive until next one so keep posting after the date in the title. Thanks to everyone for answering questions in the previous thread! submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, seemingly it's become a staple in conv net inner-working visualization to put a network in eval mode, sample a random noise image, and optimize the image in relation to the activation of some internal neuron. From what I saw, most examples of this on the internet are using an Adam optimizer for this with a learning rate of 0.1 and a weight decay of 1e-6. This doesn't seem quite right with me, So if any of you know what's the source for this convention and if there are other alternatives I'd appreciate this information very much. Thanks! submitted by /u/ondrea_luciduma [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have some experience with ML but not at all with RL. I know basic theory and want to just get started with the programming part. I saw OpenAI's gym, but I want to learn RL that can be applied anywhere. I don't want to be specifically constrained to OpenAI's gym and want something where I can apply it to game development, such as Unity. Are there any good resources to just do an RL project? submitted by /u/TrepidationTD [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have a few questions about implementing the N Step version of Prioritized Replay Buffer (for Rainbow DQN). I'm implementing the Atari version of this buffer. To conserve memory, I'm only storing the states (and the last state of each episode) in an unstacked manner. That is, if the frame stack is 4, and the shape of states returned by the environment is 4, I'm storing only the last state of the stacked states. This way the buffer contains all transitions from each episode. As for the N Steps part, I'm only calculating the n_step states when getting states from the buffer instead of storing the N Step transitions directly. For the prioritized version, how do the priorities work? If I wasn't trying to conserve memory, I would have stored the N Step stacked states directly and update the priorities for the segment trees and the segment tree pointers only when moving the data from the N Step buffer to the main buffer. But now that I'm calculating the N Step experience directly when sampling and not when adding data to the buffer, when do I update the priorities and the tree pointer? Once per state? Once per stacked state? Once per N Step stacked state? When I update the priorities for the sampled batch, the priorities are associated with multiple states (because the states are stacked). But because I don't store the stacked states and only the raw unstacked states, to which of these states should I update the priority for? And because I don't store the n step transitions anymore, to which of the N Steps should the priorities be associated with? If I want to create such a buffer for a vector env, how would I go about doing it? I'm thinking of maintaining a separate segment tree for each env. Is that correct? Is there a better way? submitted by /u/SirRantcelot [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I don't understand if having a centralized critic in multi-agent RL is the same as having a centralized training decentralized execution approach. Can you help me clarify this? submitted by /u/No_Possibility_7588 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Consider a fixed maze with size (100x400) and fixed start and endpoints (1,1) and (99,399), where doors dynamically appear around the agent every time an observation has been made. The doors disapear after some time step n (for simplicity say n=1). For pitty sake lets say the optimum path length is 1000 steps and there is only one way to reach it. I have two questions: (1) What would be the most appropriate way to frame reward function? I have tested both volatile aproach (i.e. episodeis terminated if agent steps into wall or previosuly made path, otherwise is rewarded in "cheese" every 5 steps) and not-so-volatile approach (i.e. free roam for maximum 2000 steps with cheese reward every 5 steps). Evidently these do not work, are there other perhaps more promising approaches or such large mazes? (2) Does the colour of objects in a frame matter to the (convolutional) DQN's learning of the maze. Considering a 3 channel RGB input, is there perhaps a smarter way to colour code the walls/emptypath/etc.? Its a bit of a weird question but my curiosity arises from short-term memory examples (namely, space invaders) where the input, multiple greyscale frames, is chosen over one rgb frame - so to this degree channels can be understood as higher-level "features" of a frame, hence, can the colours of different objects be optimised? If so is there a logical way of viewing such optimisation? Any other advice is always welcome :) ​ N.B. yes, this could probably be solved with other easier methods but lets just say DQN (or other deep-Q alternatives) is needed. submitted by /u/Background-Cable-491 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hello, I aim to use RL in for classification problem, But I can't see where is the difference between using RL and other ML algorithms that are used in classification (such as MLP, KNN, SVM ..) since we have a train phase in which we teach an agent ( or ML algorithm) the classe of each sample of a labeled dataset. Ok the manner of teching is different but the concept is the same. Then, in a second phase, we test the model with a test set. My question is, if I choose RL for classification problem, what is the contribution that we can have compared to another algorithm? submitted by /u/fatenLouati [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, I am trying to create a continuous 2d maze environment. I tried several algorithms but no one can give me a stable 1 success rate. From time to time, it gets stuck around the obstacle corner and fails to move anymore. Like the picture shows below. I guess it relates to my bad design for giving the next observation for an action that can't make the agent move forward. Currently, my design evenly separates the action into 10 substeps, and returns the observation which corresponds to the step right before the agent meets an obstacle. It looks like I won't have this issue for mujoco environment like Ant. But it is really hard to see their design. https://preview.redd.it/swohj8h8qev81.png?width=282&format=png&auto=webp&s=7353a62e99ff2141b3660c68ae34ce4f5cd9b94f submitted by /u/AnimatorRemarkable20 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

First of all, let's discuss what the level of AI is now. If the "level" refers to the capability of competing, the current AI has been very closed to the top human player in some types of games, like chess, Texas Poker, and Mahjong of CARDS, DOTA2 of MOBA, as well as StarCraft2 of RTS. As for other games, if we have enough human resources and computing performance, we also can get similar results. If the "level" has other meanings, like AI agents having human behavior, intelligent NPC can be designed specifically for different people so that they can have different gaming experience. These are all at the stage of issue-defining and exploring new technology solutions. Although traditional game AI is mostly based on hard code, it still has much prior knowledge. In recent years, some hot ML-r…  ( 4 min )

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Dear all, Currently I am writing my thesis on the effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on employee performance through employee engagement. If you work in a company that uses AI and you: - have a direct relationship (e.g. data scientist) or indirect relationship (e.g. business manager) with AI - often or sometimes use AI in your daily work then your insights are essential for my master thesis research and I would really appreciate it if you would fill out the survey below (5-10 min / English & Dutch translation). https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4TTnzJE4IQUoHWK Please feel free to spread the survey to as many relevant people you may know. Much appreciated!! Britt submitted by /u/BrittHermans [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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​ https://preview.redd.it/beo6czc6hhv81.png?width=1706&format=png&auto=webp&s=385f65ebfed9344781d1f9238d8d508dae27c0a3 In the last decade, AI research has brought astonishing results in many fields, and, undoubtedly, AI is nowadays a central technology in many aspects of our life. As new ideas are proposed every day, this continuous research usually comes with infinite applications: from the algorithms assisting surgeons in complex operations to the one which allows unlocking our phone using just our face. In this evolution from the idea to the actual implementation, it is often ignored how hard the passage between theoretical research and working application is. We can refer to this process as AI Development Cycle for Edge AI and can be divided into three phases related to 1) data, 2) model, and 3) evaluation. Many aspects must be considered: first, each different AI application requires a specific dataset. For this reason, in this step, the aim is to prepare the data, which, as is well known, is one of the crucial topics of AI: a good algorithm always relies on a good dataset. This phase can be divided into data collection, curation, labeling, and preparation. Continue reading submitted by /u/No_Coffee_4638 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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​ https://preview.redd.it/qaqevbqlfev81.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c2759d29a3713c2ffb998e20e8995cee4d8b2b4 submitted by /u/Smek_dev [link] [comments]

In the last decade, AI research has brought astonishing results in many fields, and, undoubtedly, AI is nowadays a central technology in many aspects of our life. As new ideas are proposed every day, this continuous research usually comes with infinite applications: from the algorithms assisting surgeons in complex operations to the one which allows unlocking our phone using just our face. In this evolution from the idea to the actual implementation, it is often ignored how hard the passage between theoretical research and working application is. We can refer to this process as AI Development Cycle for Edge AI and can be divided into three phases related to 1) data, 2) model, and 3) evaluation. Many aspects must be considered: first, each different AI application requires a specific dataset. For this reason, in this step, the aim is to prepare the data, which, as is well known, is one of the crucial topics of AI: a good algorithm always relies on a good dataset. This phase can be divided into data collection, curation, labeling, and preparation. Continue reading submitted by /u/No_Coffee_4638 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This is about a project that I am working on; Hope the ML community can help me! I have collected few hours of air pollutants data using Aeroqual sensors and custom made sensors. 3 types of data is available in the project; aeroqual, custom, council data. Where council data can be taken for granted (It comes from the govt installed high spec sensor). Aeroqual is a commercial sensor manufacturing company, its data should be accurate. The first part of the project is about checking the accuracy of custom sensor. So, I have done few analysis on the data; and found that custom sensor data has similarity (but not same, there are so much variation in the custom sensor data) with council sensor data but aeroqual data is way different. I am attaching the plot below which I have done. ​ So I need to know is there any method that I can find relationship between these three datasets? Is it possible to make these data align togather? I need to build an ML model to predict the air pollutant level using this data. any tips for getting this thing working? - Thanks in advance ​ https://preview.redd.it/fzu7dbsz0dv81.png?width=885&format=png&auto=webp&s=516d65fe3290ac8a28159547880f9dc972922b64 submitted by /u/Codename_17 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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My problem is probably what you have guessed: it's understanding the technical specifications which are usually written in a non-coding-friendly way. Sometimes crucial information is completely missing from the paper ex: loss function description for a DL algorithm. For the lucky cases where there are already available implementations on github to a given paper, usually they are either very distinguishable from each other in terms of code structure which questions their validity or whether they match what the paper authors intended specially with varying measurable results, or they are almost exact copies from one another. There are numerous examples where I can show specific papers with varying degrees of complexity, and discuss why the conversion can be tricky but they may require standalone discussions themselves, likely outside the scope of this one. Is there a way to approach the problem assuming the absence of reference code? submitted by /u/shine-box [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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I host an important org level meeting (~100 attendees) every week, and need to share minutes after the meeting. I am so tired of listening to conversations again just to capture important points, summarise discussion and action items. Is there any model/api which can help me do that? I use Amazon transcribe to generate transcripts, which helps, but it is not very accurate. For me the priority would be: 1) Model/api which is better than Amazon transcribe 2) Auto Identify speakers / speaker diarization (since mostly the same set of people speak) 3) Summarise the conversations into topics (we have time and agenda based discussion) I am sure this might be a problem across the industry since most of the meetings happen online, and someone wastes hours after meeting to send notes. I did find some tools which summarise the transcript, but i need to auto send in a specific format and identify topics based on conversion (maybe we can input the agenda in advance). Also this is private information, so I need something on premise, hence looking for a repo or model which i can use to build something on top. Please let me know if something exists or someone working on similar projects. Happy to collaborate and contribute. submitted by /u/super_commando-dhruv [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This research will test the human ability to distinguish human written text from text generated by artificial intelligence. Participating will only take 10 minutes. You will receive 2 short news articles about the same topic. One will be written by a human, the other one will be generated by artificial intelligence. It is up to you to find out which one is written by artificial intelligence. You will be asked to do this for four different subjects, namely: Science, Economics & Politics, Society and Sports. At the end of the survey you will receive feedback on how well you have performed. The human written articles were collected from various news websites. The Articles created by artificial intelligence were generated using GPT-3 from OpenAI. Purpose of the research: We are trying to find out how well GPT-3 performs across subjects. Are there any subject GPT-3 is better at writing about, or is he equally good across all subjects. Secondly we are testing the ability of GPT-3 to generate articles about events that happened after the training of the model. You can participate by clicking on the link below, thank you very much for your participation. https://vub.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b2E9f6hGxNDH13M submitted by /u/RobinSandersVUB [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

2000 GPUs and 8000 CPUs. And where could I even get such a vast affordance? submitted by /u/samlerman [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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I selected 5 ready-made algorithms for face detection and compared them with each other by such metrics as Precision, Recall, IOU and time on the dataset I marked up. I am ready to accept your Pull Request with your solutions(algorithms) and results! GitHub: https://github.com/wb-08/face-detection-algorithms-comparison Blog post: https://habr.com/ru/post/661671/ submitted by /u/wb-08 [link] [comments]

I have been interviewing for a machine learning lead position. I have successfully passed 3 interview rounds (coding , HR, system design). I have my final interview with the VP of Engineering. When asked how best to prepare myself, they said they would like to test my ability to write "production quality" code in python. While I do have some experience, the downside is I worked in small R&D teams for a long time. Though I am knowledgeable in python, perhaps, I might have not followed all the industry best practices. If you are a hiring manager or interviewer, how would you test this ability? How do I prepare myself to prove my ability to write production grade code? Thank you all so much in advance. submitted by /u/mbkv [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

I'm comparing different GAN models (CGan, DCGan, WGan, StyleGan) in tensorflow2. In general, I want to use the images that I generate with the generator to train a classifier while being as realistic as possible. At first, I wanted to let them train for 24 hours each, define some early stopping criteria and save the checkpoints with the lowest loss through a callback. But it seems that the lower loss does not always lead to more realistic images. So how do I compare the different models in a scientific way? Because the results highly depend on the epoch I choose and my subjective feeling, which images look the best. submitted by /u/Bonkikong [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E_6ARbrMmc submitted by /u/Thenamessd [link] [comments]

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Github: https://github.com/labmlai/neox Annotated implementation: https://lit.labml.ai/github/labmlai/neox/tree/main/src/neox/__init__.py Original repo from EleutherAI: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox We have included samples showing how to generate text and to fine-tune. We haven't included a bunch of optimizations that were present in original GPT-NeoX to keep things simple. submitted by /u/hnipun [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello! If you are using jax and you need to pass some pytrees between processes, I may have something for you :) I developed a "treequeue". It is a queue that is made for pytree's nested arrays. The transfer speed is up to 10 times higher than regular queues. This is done by utilizing shared memory arrays and avoiding pickling data. This can be very useful when developing distributed architecture, e.g. distributed reinforcement learning where speed is at the upmost importance. In my case this implementation was very useful to remove bottlenecks when implementing PBT algorithms! https://github.com/thomashirtz/treequeues Cheers! submitted by /u/krenast [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Comes with ‘white paper’ and example notebooks… seems legit..? Anyone tried this out yet? Github Paper] submitted by /u/proportional-hazard [link] [comments]

I know that many people (including me) were surprised after seeing the image quality of ViT-VQGAN and disappointed to know there won't be no source code released. Therefore, I've decided to implement it by myself and here is the code. I hope this can help everyone as a starting point for ViT-VQGAN. submitted by /u/ThunaClone [link] [comments]

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In reviewing various approaches to end-to-end deep learning for autonomous driving, I've come across an interesting approach in this paper that I would like to discuss with others... I will begin by summarizing the approach: ​ A ResNet50 architecture is used as an encoder network with the input being an RGB image + depth map concatenated as (224 x 224 x 4). In the paper it is argued that a point cloud can also be used, or some other sensor modality would also work The encoder network output (feature map of 7 x 7 x 2048) is fed into a decoder network that takes it back to (224 x 224 x 5) with pixel wise semantic segmentation of 5 classes: lane, road line, sidewalk, vehicles or pedestrians, and others That same encoder output (feature map of 7 x 7 x 2048) is global average pooled to 2…  ( 2 min )

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Dall-E-2. Excellent. It's very high quality. But it's a combination of the data. ​ What did we want? We wanted some amazing work that made us cry with just one line of writing or one image. ​ "Oh, copied it well. It's pretty much the same." It's not enough. But how can that be improve? I think the answer is the feedback method. ​ ​ The current evaluation method of writing, image, video, and sound is too indirect. ​ Sales revenue Number of Subscribers Number of views Like / Dislike Ratings by section, Revisit Rate <<< Those are better than others Emotion analysis of Comments using AI Internal staff scores ​ There are so many conditions other than the quality of contents that people's judgment can intervene in. In the first place, people don't express exactly what they…  ( 3 min )

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Hello there, if one would want to get into AI and especially human like AI, would you still recommend getting into machine learning first? As far as i know machine learning doesnt even try to develop "human like" AI/"bottom up AI", but rather focuses on training algorythms to solve specific problems. I know human like AI is something thats highly complex and we still need years if not even decades to achieve something even close to it but i would appreciate tips and ideas nonetheless. (after reading through my question again this sounds like a generic question thats being asked here everyday, if thats the case please send me a link to a similar post if there is one :) ) submitted by /u/Garic152 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi everyone Im doing a project with my friends where we should use computer vision/iot to create a solution for people with disabilities or in the healthcare system Any ideas please submitted by /u/armyy__ [link] [comments]

From improving the user experience to making the computational infrastructure more effective, AI is a crucial aspect of making current software systems and products perform as well as possible. AI is often more effective than even precisely developed human-crafted heuristic tactics today, whether it’s reducing latency, boosting the quality of a video stream, or streamlining the interfaces to match a specific person’s demands. But, to use AI more effectively in various products, several challenges must be addressed: the system must accommodate software engineers without machine learning backgrounds; it must provide mechanisms to optimize for a variety of product goals, which may differ from closed-form machine learning loss functions; it must distinguish causal connections from data correlations; and it must scale efficiently to train, host, and monitor vast numbers of AI models. Meta Researchers Develop ‘Looper,’ an end-to-end AI platform that has been designed with easy-to-use APIs for optimization, personalization, and feedback collecting to answer these needs. Looper may be used to support the entire machine learning lifecycle, from model training to deployment and inference to product evaluation and optimization. Looper allows us to modify the existing products to leverage AI for personalized optimizations rather than having to rebuild them around AI models. Currently, the Looper platform hosts 700 AI models and produces 4 million AI outputs every second. Continue reading Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.07554.pdf submitted by /u/No_Coffee_4638 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm looking to create a way to automate original story ideas based on previous ideas. I want to be able to input 1000+ original sentences and have an output of an original sentence that is inspired the previous ones. Are there any programs that can do this or will I need to develop my own? submitted by /u/yea_okay_dude [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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I am training PPO2 model on stable-baseline library. I have tabular data with 15000 rows, thus length of the episodes is 15000. I am using nminibatches=4, n_envs=1. For example, I have set total_timesteps=10000. During the training process agent will see 15000 rows several times and updates actions for each rows, but in some particular point, the rest of the time total_timesteps will not be enough to see the full episode, and only part of episodes is available in the last step of learning. To be concrete. For simplicity, lets say we have 10 raws, 23 total_timesteps. The agent will see the full episode 2 times, and only the first 3 rows in the third times and rest of the 7 raws have not seen during last step. I want to stop the learning process when Agent reaches the last time full episodes (above example stop learning at when total_timesteps=20) or define total_timesteps in such a way to see full episodes at the end of the training step. submitted by /u/Mariam_Dundua [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello guys, I am pretty new to the rl field and write now i am doing my thesis in it. I've come across a problem in my code. I created a custom environment and when i am trying to solve it with my dqn agent using stable baselines3, I am able to execute the code and print out the required things but the agent is not learning. Any help ? thanks. submitted by /u/last_2_brain_cells97 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi guys, I am new to RL and reading tutorial of spinning up which focus on policy based algorithms. In the derivation of VPG, the tutorial said"The environment has no dependence on /theta(the parameter of policy), so gradients of R(/tau)(total return of the trajectory) with respect of /theta is 0. However, the trajectory depends on our policy, and our policy depends on /theta. As a result, I am confused why total return of trajectory is independent from /theta. submitted by /u/SkyRimT [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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I see lots of hardware oriented toward AI/ML stuff these days, including chips with hardware acceleration for neural networks. I'm thinking about how GPUs were initially designed for graphics calculations, but then things like CUDA and OpenCL were developed to make that hardware usable for broader applications of parallel processing. Are there any other things that you can do with a neural network besides backpropagation, that wouldn't be easier to do in other ways? submitted by /u/Bananawamajama [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

In academia, for better or worse, we have what’s called a peer review system, where papers get accepted to journals, conferences, or other venues on the basis of reviews from other researchers, who ideally are subject area experts and thus are qualified to evaluate the paper. The reviewers also cannot have a conflict of interest with the authors, and should not be overwhelmed with too many papers to review. This is the ideal world, and is not always what happens in practice. From my experience in the robotics academic community (and this may apply to other disciplines), it generally seems like there is no standard definition of an “appropriate” or “maximum” reviewing load for a reviewer. This is difficult to define as different papers mandate different reviewing efforts; a massive journal …  ( 4 min )

A recent paper (Neural Networks, {\bf 132} (2020), 253-268) introduces a straightforward and simple kernel based approximation for manifold learning that does not require the knowledge of anything about the manifold, except for its dimension. In this paper, we examine how the pointwise error in approximation using least squares optimization based on similarly localized kernels depends upon the data characteristics and deteriorates as one goes away from the training data. The theory is presented with an abstract localized kernel, which can utilize any prior knowledge about the data being located on an unknown sub-manifold of a known manifold. We demonstrate the performance of our approach using a publicly available micro-Doppler data set, and investigate the use of different preprocessing measures, kernels, and manifold dimensions. Specifically, it is shown that the localized kernel introduced in the above mentioned paper when used with PCA components leads to a near-competitive performance to deep neural networks, and offers significant improvements in training speed and memory requirements. To demonstrate the fact that our methods are agnostic to the domain knowledge, we examine the classification problem in a simple video data set.

In this work we explore a new framework for approximate Bayesian inference in large datasets based on stochastic control (i.e. Schr\"odinger bridges). We advocate stochastic control as a finite time and low variance alternative to popular steady-state methods such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD). Furthermore, we discuss and adapt the existing theoretical guarantees of this framework and establish connections to already existing VI routines in SDE-based models.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition with organ dysfunction and is a leading cause of death and critical illness worldwide. Accurate detection of sepsis during emergency department triage would allow early initiation of lab analysis, antibiotic administration, and other sepsis treatment protocols. The purpose of this study was to determine whether EHR data can be extracted and synthesized with the latest machine learning algorithms (KATE Sepsis) and clinical natural language processing to produce accurate sepsis models, and compare KATE Sepsis performance with existing sepsis screening protocols, such as SIRS and qSOFA. A machine learning model (KATE Sepsis) was developed using patient encounters with triage data from 16 participating hospitals. KATE Sepsis, SIRS, standard screening (SIRS with source of infection) and qSOFA were tested in three settings. Cohort-A was a retrospective analysis on medical records from a single Site 1. Cohort-B was a prospective analysis of Site 1. Cohort-C was a retrospective analysis on Site 1 with 15 additional sites. Across all cohorts, KATE Sepsis demonstrates an AUC of 0.94-0.963 with 73-74.87% TPR and 3.76-7.17% FPR. Standard screening demonstrates an AUC of 0.682-0.726 with 39.39-51.19% TPR and 2.9-6.02% FPR. The qSOFA protocol demonstrates an AUC of 0.544-0.56, with 10.52-13.18% TPR and 1.22-1.68% FPR. For severe sepsis, across all cohorts, KATE Sepsis demonstrates an AUC of 0.935-0.972 with 70-82.26% TPR and 4.64-8.62% FPR. For septic shock, across all cohorts, KATE Sepsis demonstrates an AUC of 0.96-0.981 with 85.71-89.66% TPR and 4.85-8.8% FPR. SIRS, standard screening, and qSOFA demonstrate low AUC and TPR for severe sepsis and septic shock detection. KATE Sepsis provided substantially better sepsis detection performance in triage than commonly used screening protocols.

Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.

Deep learning has recently achieved initial success in program analysis tasks such as bug detection. Lacking real bugs, most existing works construct training and test data by injecting synthetic bugs into correct programs. Despite achieving high test accuracy (e.g. >90%), the resulting bug detectors are found to be surprisingly unusable in practice, i.e., <10% precision when used to scan real software repositories. In this work, we argue that this massive performance difference is caused by distribution shift, i.e., a fundamental mismatch between the real bug distribution and the synthetic bug distribution used to train and evaluate the detectors. To address this key challenge, we propose to train a bug detector in two phases, first on a synthetic bug distribution to adapt the model to the bug detection domain, and then on a real bug distribution to drive the model towards the real distribution. During these two phases, we leverage a multi-task hierarchy, focal loss, and contrastive learning to further boost performance. We evaluate our approach extensively on three widely studied bug types, for which we construct new datasets carefully designed to capture the real bug distribution. The results demonstrate that our approach is practically effective and successfully mitigates the distribution shift: our learned detectors are highly performant on both our constructed test set and the latest version of open source repositories.

Persuading people to change their opinions is a common practice in online discussion forums on topics ranging from political campaigns to relationship consultation. Enhancing people's ability to write persuasive arguments could not only practice their critical thinking and reasoning but also contribute to the effectiveness and civility in online communication. It is, however, not an easy task in online discussion settings where written words are the primary communication channel. In this paper, we derived four design goals for a tool that helps users improve the persuasiveness of arguments in online discussions through a survey with 123 online forum users and interviews with five debating experts. To satisfy these design goals, we analyzed and built a labeled dataset of fine-grained persuasive strategies (i.e., logos, pathos, ethos, and evidence) in 164 arguments with high ratings on persuasiveness from ChangeMyView, a popular online discussion forum. We then designed an interactive visual system, Persua, which provides example-based guidance on persuasive strategies to enhance the persuasiveness of arguments. In particular, the system constructs portfolios of arguments based on different persuasive strategies applied to a given discussion topic. It then presents concrete examples based on the difference between the portfolios of user input and high-quality arguments in the dataset. A between-subjects study shows suggestive evidence that Persua encourages users to submit more times for feedback and helps users improve more on the persuasiveness of their arguments than a baseline system. Finally, a set of design considerations was summarized to guide future intelligent systems that improve the persuasiveness in text.

Learning to hash pictures a list-wise sorting problem. Its testing metrics, e.g., mean-average precision, count on a sorted candidate list ordered by pair-wise code similarity. However, scarcely does one train a deep hashing model with the sorted results end-to-end because of the non-differentiable nature of the sorting operation. This inconsistency in the objectives of training and test may lead to sub-optimal performance since the training loss often fails to reflect the actual retrieval metric. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing Naturally-Sorted Hashing (NSH). We sort the Hamming distances of samples' hash codes and accordingly gather their latent representations for self-supervised training. Thanks to the recent advances in differentiable sorting approximations, the hash head receives gradients from the sorter so that the hash encoder can be optimized along with the training procedure. Additionally, we describe a novel Sorted Noise-Contrastive Estimation (SortedNCE) loss that selectively picks positive and negative samples for contrastive learning, which allows NSH to mine data semantic relations during training in an unsupervised manner. Our extensive experiments show the proposed NSH model significantly outperforms the existing unsupervised hashing methods on three benchmarked datasets.

Shapelet-based algorithms are widely used for time series classification because of their ease of interpretation, but they are currently outperformed by recent state-of-the-art approaches. We present a new formulation of time series shapelets including the notion of dilation, and we introduce a new shapelet feature to enhance their discriminative power for classification. Experiments performed on 112 datasets show that our method improves on the state-of-the-art shapelet algorithm, and achieves comparable accuracy to recent state-of-the-art approaches, without sacrificing neither scalability, nor interpretability.

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large number of trials to learn a good policy, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We explore a method to improve the sample efficiency when we have access to demonstrations. Our approach, Backplay, uses a single demonstration to construct a curriculum for a given task. Rather than starting each training episode in the environment's fixed initial state, we start the agent near the end of the demonstration and move the starting point backwards during the course of training until we reach the initial state. Our contributions are that we analytically characterize the types of environments where Backplay can improve training speed, demonstrate the effectiveness of Backplay both in large grid worlds and a complex four player zero-sum game (Pommerman), and show that Backplay compares favorably to other competitive methods known to improve sample efficiency. This includes reward shaping, behavioral cloning, and reverse curriculum generation.

The reconstruction of electrons and photons in CMS depends on topological clustering of the energy deposited by an incident particle in different crystals of the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL). These clusters are formed by aggregating neighbouring crystals according to the expected topology of an electromagnetic shower in the ECAL. The presence of upstream material (beampipe, tracker and support structures) causes electrons and photons to start showering before reaching the calorimeter. This effect, combined with the 3.8T CMS magnetic field, leads to energy being spread in several clusters around the primary one. It is essential to recover the energy contained in these satellite clusters in order to achieve the best possible energy resolution for physics analyses. Historically satellite clusters have been associated to the primary cluster using a purely topological algorithm which does not attempt to remove spurious energy deposits from additional pileup interactions (PU). The performance of this algorithm is expected to degrade during LHC Run 3 (2022+) because of the larger average PU levels and the increasing levels of noise due to the ageing of the ECAL detector. New methods are being investigated that exploit state-of-the-art deep learning architectures like Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and self-attention algorithms. These more sophisticated models improve the energy collection and are more resilient to PU and noise, helping to preserve the electron and photon energy resolution achieved during LHC Runs 1 and 2. This work will cover the challenges of training the models as well the opportunity that this new approach offers to unify the ECAL energy measurement with the particle identification steps used in the global CMS photon and electron reconstruction.

Dissolved Gas-in-oil analysis (DGA) is used to monitor the condition of bushings on large power transformers. There are different techniques used in determining the conditions from the data collected, but in this work the Artificial Intelligence techniques are investigated. This work investigates which gases in DGA are related to each other and which ones are important for making decisions. When the related and crucial gases are determined, the other gases are discarded thereby reducing the number of attributes in DGA. Hence a further investigation is done to see how these new datasets influence the performance of the classifiers used to classify the DGA of full attributes. The classifiers used in these experiments were Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) whereas the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Rough Set (RS), Incremental Granular Ranking (GR++) and Decision Trees (DT) were used to reduce the attributes of the dataset. The parameters used when training the BPNN and SVM classifiers are kept fixed to create a controlled test environment when investigating the effects of reducing the number of gases. This work further introduced a new classifier that can handle high dimension dataset and noisy dataset, Rough Neural Network (RNN).

The syntactic categories of categorial grammar formalisms are structured units made of smaller, indivisible primitives, bound together by the underlying grammar's category formation rules. In the trending approach of constructive supertagging, neural models are increasingly made aware of the internal category structure, which in turn enables them to more reliably predict rare and out-of-vocabulary categories, with significant implications for grammars previously deemed too complex to find practical use. In this work, we revisit constructive supertagging from a graph-theoretic perspective, and propose a framework based on heterogeneous dynamic graph convolutions aimed at exploiting the distinctive structure of a supertagger's output space. We test our approach on a number of categorial grammar datasets spanning different languages and grammar formalisms, achieving substantial improvements over previous state of the art scores. Code will be made available at https://github.com/konstantinosKokos/dynamic-graph-supertagging

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are facing increasing cyber-physical attacks that can cause catastrophes in the physical system. Efficient anomaly detection models in the industrial sensor networks are essential for enhancing ICS reliability and security, due to the sensor data is related to the operational state of the ICS. Considering the limited availability of computing resources, this paper proposes a hybrid anomaly detection approach in cloud-edge collaboration industrial sensor networks. The hybrid approach consists of sensor data detection models deployed at the edges and a sensor data analysis model deployed in the cloud. The sensor data detection model based on Gaussian and Bayesian algorithms can detect the anomalous sensor data in real-time and upload them to the cloud for further analysis, filtering the normal sensor data and reducing traffic load. The sensor data analysis model based on Graph convolutional network, Residual algorithm and Long short-term memory network (GCRL) can effectively extract the spatial and temporal features and then identify the attack precisely. The proposed hybrid anomaly detection approach is evaluated using a benchmark dataset and baseline anomaly detection models. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve an overall 11.19% increase in Recall and an impressive 14.29% improvement in F1-score, compared with the existing models.

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We propose a novel Transformer architecture consisting of a new conditional attention mechanism as well as a set of task-conditioned modules that facilitate weight sharing. Through this construction (a hypernetwork adapter), we achieve more efficient parameter sharing and mitigate forgetting by keeping half of the weights of a pretrained model fixed. We also use a new multi-task data sampling strategy to mitigate the negative effects of data imbalance across tasks. Using this approach, we are able to surpass single task fine-tuning methods while being parameter and data efficient (using around 66% of the data for weight updates). Compared to other BERT Large methods on GLUE, our 8-task model surpasses other Adapter methods by 2.8% and our 24-task model outperforms by 0.7-1.0% models that use MTL and single task fine-tuning. We show that a larger variant of our single multi-task model approach performs competitively across 26 NLP tasks and yields state-of-the-art results on a number of test and development sets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CAMTL/CA-MTL.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how healthcare is delivered to patients, how patients interact with healthcare providers, and how healthcare information is disseminated to both healthcare providers and patients. Analytical models that were trained and tested pre-pandemic may no longer be performing up to expectations, providing unreliable and irrelevant learning (ML) models given that ML depends on the basic principle that what happened in the past are likely to repeat in the future. ML faced to two important degradation principles, concept drift, when the underlying properties and characteristics of the variables change and data drift, when the data distributions, probabilities, co-variates, and other variable relationships change, both of which are prime culprits of model failure. Therefore, detecting and diagnosing drift in existing models is something that has become an imperative. And perhaps even more important is a shift in our mindset towards a conscious recognition that drift is inevitable, and model building must incorporate intentional resilience, the ability to offset and recover quickly from failure, and proactive robustness, avoiding failure by developing models that are less vulnerable to drift and disruption.

Anomaly detection has many applications ranging from bank-fraud detection and cyber-threat detection to equipment maintenance and health monitoring. However, choosing a suitable algorithm for a given application remains a challenging design decision, often informed by the literature on anomaly detection algorithms. We extensively reviewed twelve of the most popular unsupervised anomaly detection methods. We observed that, so far, they have been compared using inconsistent protocols - the choice of the class of interest or the positive class, the split of training and test data, and the choice of hyperparameters - leading to ambiguous evaluations. This observation led us to define a coherent evaluation protocol which we then used to produce an updated and more precise picture of the relative performance of the twelve methods on five widely used tabular datasets. While our evaluation cannot pinpoint a method that outperforms all the others on all datasets, it identifies those that stand out and revise misconceived knowledge about their relative performances.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been severely impacting global society since December 2019. Massive research has been undertaken to understand the characteristics of the virus and design vaccines and drugs. The related findings have been reported in biomedical literature at a rate of about 10,000 articles on COVID-19 per month. Such rapid growth significantly challenges manual curation and interpretation. For instance, LitCovid is a literature database of COVID-19-related articles in PubMed, which has accumulated more than 200,000 articles with millions of accesses each month by users worldwide. One primary curation task is to assign up to eight topics (e.g., Diagnosis and Treatment) to the articles in LitCovid. Despite the continuing advances in biomedical text mining methods, few have been dedicated to topic annotations in COVID-19 literature. To close the gap, we organized the BioCreative LitCovid track to call for a community effort to tackle automated topic annotation for COVID-19 literature. The BioCreative LitCovid dataset, consisting of over 30,000 articles with manually reviewed topics, was created for training and testing. It is one of the largest multilabel classification datasets in biomedical scientific literature. 19 teams worldwide participated and made 80 submissions in total. Most teams used hybrid systems based on transformers. The highest performing submissions achieved 0.8875, 0.9181, and 0.9394 for macro F1-score, micro F1-score, and instance-based F1-score, respectively. The level of participation and results demonstrate a successful track and help close the gap between dataset curation and method development. The dataset is publicly available via https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/lu/LitCovid/biocreative/ for benchmarking and further development.

We introduce an unsupervised clustering algorithm to improve training efficiency and accuracy in predicting energies using molecular-orbital-based machine learning (MOB-ML). This work determines clusters via the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in an entirely automatic manner and simplifies an earlier supervised clustering approach [J. Chem. Theory Comput., 15, 6668 (2019)] by eliminating both the necessity for user-specified parameters and the training of an additional classifier. Unsupervised clustering results from GMM have the advantage of accurately reproducing chemically intuitive groupings of frontier molecular orbitals and having improved performance with an increasing number of training examples. The resulting clusters from supervised or unsupervised clustering is further combined with scalable Gaussian process regression (GPR) or linear regression (LR) to learn molecular energies accurately by generating a local regression model in each cluster. Among all four combinations of regressors and clustering methods, GMM combined with scalable exact Gaussian process regression (GMM/GPR) is the most efficient training protocol for MOB-ML. The numerical tests of molecular energy learning on thermalized datasets of drug-like molecules demonstrate the improved accuracy, transferability, and learning efficiency of GMM/GPR over not only other training protocols for MOB-ML, i.e., supervised regression-clustering combined with GPR(RC/GPR) and GPR without clustering. GMM/GPR also provide the best molecular energy predictions compared with the ones from literature on the same benchmark datasets. With a lower scaling, GMM/GPR has a 10.4-fold speedup in wall-clock training time compared with scalable exact GPR with a training size of 6500 QM7b-T molecules.

Online learning with expert advice is a fundamental problem of sequential prediction. In this problem, the algorithm has access to a set of $n$ "experts" who make predictions on each day. The goal on each day is to process these predictions, and make a prediction with the minimum cost. After making a prediction, the algorithm sees the actual outcome on that day, updates its state, and then moves on to the next day. An algorithm is judged by how well it does compared to the best expert in the set. The classical algorithm for this problem is the multiplicative weights algorithm. However, every application, to our knowledge, relies on storing weights for every expert, and uses $\Omega(n)$ memory. There is little work on understanding the memory required to solve the online learning with expert advice problem, or run standard sequential prediction algorithms, in natural streaming models, which is especially important when the number of experts, as well as the number of days on which the experts make predictions, is large. We initiate the study of the learning with expert advice problem in the streaming setting, and show lower and upper bounds. Our lower bound for i.i.d., random order, and adversarial order streams uses a reduction to a custom-built problem using a novel masking technique, to show a smooth trade-off for regret versus memory. Our upper bounds show novel ways to run standard sequential prediction algorithms in rounds on small "pools" of experts, thus reducing the necessary memory. For random-order streams, we show that our upper bound is tight up to low order terms. We hope that these results and techniques will have broad applications in online learning, and can inspire algorithms based on standard sequential prediction techniques, like multiplicative weights, for a wide range of other problems in the memory-constrained setting.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have recently achieved leading performances in many generative tasks. However, the inherited iterative sampling process costs hindered their applications to speech synthesis. This paper proposes FastDiff, a fast conditional diffusion model for high-quality speech synthesis. FastDiff employs a stack of time-aware location-variable convolutions of diverse receptive field patterns to efficiently model long-term time dependencies with adaptive conditions. A noise schedule predictor is also adopted to reduce the sampling steps without sacrificing the generation quality. Based on FastDiff, we design an end-to-end text-to-speech synthesizer, FastDiff-TTS, which generates high-fidelity speech waveforms without any intermediate feature (e.g., Mel-spectrogram). Our evaluation of FastDiff demonstrates the state-of-the-art results with higher-quality (MOS 4.28) speech samples. Also, FastDiff enables a sampling speed of 58x faster than real-time on a V100 GPU, making diffusion models practically applicable to speech synthesis deployment for the first time. We further show that FastDiff generalized well to the mel-spectrogram inversion of unseen speakers, and FastDiff-TTS outperformed other competing methods in end-to-end text-to-speech synthesis. Audio samples are available at \url{https://FastDiff.github.io/}.

Due to the prosperity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, more and more backdoors are designed by adversaries to attack Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).Although the state-of-the-art method Neural Attention Distillation (NAD) can effectively erase backdoor triggers from DNNs, it still suffers from non-negligible Attack Success Rate (ASR) together with lowered classification ACCuracy (ACC), since NAD focuses on backdoor defense using attention features (i.e., attention maps) of the same order. In this paper, we introduce a novel backdoor defense framework named Attention Relation Graph Distillation (ARGD), which fully explores the correlation among attention features with different orders using our proposed Attention Relation Graphs (ARGs). Based on the alignment of ARGs between both teacher and student models during knowledge distillation, ARGD can eradicate more backdoor triggers than NAD. Comprehensive experimental results show that, against six latest backdoor attacks, ARGD outperforms NAD by up to 94.85% reduction in ASR, while ACC can be improved by up to 3.23%.

In this paper, we explore the usability of different natural language processing models for the sentiment analysis of social media applied to financial market prediction, using the cryptocurrency domain as a reference. We study how the different sentiment metrics are correlated with the price movements of Bitcoin. For this purpose, we explore different methods to calculate the sentiment metrics from a text finding most of them not very accurate for this prediction task. We find that one of the models outperforms more than 20 other public ones and makes it possible to fine-tune it efficiently given its interpretable nature. Thus we confirm that interpretable artificial intelligence and natural language processing methods might be more valuable practically than non-explainable and non-interpretable ones. In the end, we analyse potential causal connections between the different sentiment metrics and the price movements.

Contrastive learning is widely used for recommendation model learning, where selecting representative and informative negative samples is critical. Existing methods usually focus on centralized data, where abundant and high-quality negative samples are easy to obtain. However, centralized user data storage and exploitation may lead to privacy risks and concerns, while decentralized user data on a single client can be too sparse and biased for accurate contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose a federated contrastive learning method named FedCL for privacy-preserving recommendation, which can exploit high-quality negative samples for effective model training with privacy well protected. We first infer user embeddings from local user data through the local model on each client, and then perturb them with local differential privacy (LDP) before sending them to a central server for hard negative sampling. Since individual user embedding contains heavy noise due to LDP, we propose to cluster user embeddings on the server to mitigate the influence of noise, and the cluster centroids are used to retrieve hard negative samples from the item pool. These hard negative samples are delivered to user clients and mixed with the observed negative samples from local data as well as in-batch negatives constructed from positive samples for federated model training. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show FedCL can empower various recommendation methods in a privacy-preserving way.

Contrastive learning has gained popularity as an effective self-supervised representation learning technique. Several research directions improve traditional contrastive approaches, e.g., prototypical contrastive methods better capture the semantic similarity among instances and reduce the computational burden by considering cluster prototypes or cluster assignments, while adversarial instance-wise contrastive methods improve robustness against a variety of attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work jointly considers robustness, cluster-wise semantic similarity and computational efficiency. In this work, we propose SwARo, an adversarial contrastive framework that incorporates cluster assignment permutations to generate representative adversarial samples. We evaluate SwARo on multiple benchmark datasets and against various white-box and black-box attacks, obtaining consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

Differentiable architecture search has gradually become the mainstream research topic in the field of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for its high efficiency compared with the early NAS (EA-based, RL-based) methods. Recent differentiable NAS also aims at further improving the search performance and reducing the GPU-memory consumption. However, these methods are no longer naturally capable of tackling the non-differentiable objectives, e.g., energy, resource-constrained efficiency, and other metrics, let alone the multi-objective search demands. Researches in the multi-objective NAS field target this but requires vast computational resources cause of the sole optimization of each candidate architecture. In light of this discrepancy, we propose the TND-NAS, which is with the merits of the high efficiency in differentiable NAS framework and the compatibility among non-differentiable metrics in Multi-objective NAS. Under the differentiable NAS framework, with the continuous relaxation of the search space, TND-NAS has the architecture parameters ($\alpha$) been optimized in discrete space, while resorting to the progressive search space shrinking by $\alpha$. Our representative experiment takes two objectives (Parameters, Accuracy) as an example, we achieve a series of high-performance compact architectures on CIFAR10 (1.09M/3.3\%, 2.4M/2.95\%, 9.57M/2.54\%) and CIFAR100 (2.46M/18.3\%, 5.46/16.73\%, 12.88/15.20\%) datasets. Favorably, compared with other multi-objective NAS methods, TND-NAS is less time-consuming (1.3 GPU-days on NVIDIA 1080Ti, 1/6 of that in NSGA-Net), and can be conveniently adapted to real-world NAS scenarios (resource-constrained, platform-specialized).

Pretrained language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance when adapted to a downstream NLP task. However, theoretical analysis of these models is scarce and challenging since the pretraining and downstream tasks can be very different. We propose an analysis framework that links the pretraining and downstream tasks with an underlying latent variable generative model of text -- the downstream classifier must recover a function of the posterior distribution over the latent variables. We analyze head tuning (learning a classifier on top of the frozen pretrained model) and prompt tuning in this setting. The generative model in our analysis is either a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) or an HMM augmented with a latent memory component, motivated by long-term dependencies in natural language. We show that 1) under certain non-degeneracy conditions on the HMM, simple classification heads can solve the downstream task, 2) prompt tuning obtains downstream guarantees with weaker non-degeneracy conditions, and 3) our recovery guarantees for the memory-augmented HMM are stronger than for the vanilla HMM because task-relevant information is easier to recover from the long-term memory. Experiments on synthetically generated data from HMMs back our theoretical findings.  ( 2 min )

Fast-developing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outpace the efforts of encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, which either do not completely cover recently-introduced topics or lack such content entirely. As a result, methods for automatically producing content are valuable tools to address this information overload. We show that recent advances in pretrained language modeling can be combined for a two-stage extractive and abstractive approach for Wikipedia lead paragraph generation. We extend this approach to generate longer Wikipedia-style summaries with sections and examine how such methods struggle in this application through detailed studies with 100 reference human-collected surveys. This is the first study on utilizing web resources for long Wikipedia-style summaries to the best of our knowledge.  ( 2 min )

We present CrissCross, a self-supervised framework for learning audio-visual representations. A novel notion is introduced in our framework whereby in addition to learning the intra-modal and standard synchronous cross-modal relations, CrissCross also learns asynchronous cross-modal relationships. We show that by relaxing the temporal synchronicity between the audio and visual modalities, the network learns strong generalized representations. Our experiments show that strong augmentations for both audio and visual modalities with relaxation of cross-modal temporal synchronicity optimize performance. To pretrain our proposed framework, we use 3 different datasets with varying sizes, Kinetics-Sound, Kinetics400, and AudioSet. The learned representations are evaluated on a number of downstream tasks namely action recognition, sound classification, and retrieval. CrissCross shows state-of-the-art performances on action recognition (UCF101 and HMDB51) and sound classification (ESC50 and DCASE). The codes and pretrained models will be made publicly available.  ( 2 min )

Despite the remarkable performance that modern deep neural networks have achieved on independent and identically distributed (I.I.D.) data, they can crash under distribution shifts. Most current evaluation methods for domain generalization (DG) adopt the leave-one-out strategy as a compromise on the limited number of domains. We propose a large-scale benchmark with extensive labeled domains named NICO++ along with more rational evaluation methods for comprehensively evaluating DG algorithms. To evaluate DG datasets, we propose two metrics to quantify covariate shift and concept shift, respectively. Two novel generalization bounds from the perspective of data construction are proposed to prove that limited concept shift and significant covariate shift favor the evaluation capability for generalization. Through extensive experiments, NICO++ shows its superior evaluation capability compared with current DG datasets and its contribution in alleviating unfairness caused by the leak of oracle knowledge in model selection.

Quality-Diversity algorithms provide efficient mechanisms to generate large collections of diverse and high-performing solutions, which have shown to be instrumental for solving downstream tasks. However, most of those algorithms rely on a behavioural descriptor to characterise the diversity that is hand-coded, hence requiring prior knowledge about the considered tasks. In this work, we introduce Relevance-guided Unsupervised Discovery of Abilities; a Quality-Diversity algorithm that autonomously finds a behavioural characterisation tailored to the task at hand. In particular, our method introduces a custom diversity metric that leads to higher densities of solutions near the areas of interest in the learnt behavioural descriptor space. We evaluate our approach on a simulated robotic environment, where the robot has to autonomously discover its abilities based on its full sensory data. We evaluated the algorithms on three tasks: navigation to random targets, moving forward with a high velocity, and performing half-rolls. The experimental results show that our method manages to discover collections of solutions that are not only diverse, but also well-adapted to the considered downstream task.

Applying deep learning (DL) techniques in the electronic design automation (EDA) field has become a trending topic. Most solutions apply well-developed DL models to solve specific EDA problems. While demonstrating promising results, they require careful model tuning for every problem. The fundamental question on "How to obtain a general and effective neural representation of circuits?" has not been answered yet. In this work, we take the first step towards solving this problem. We propose DeepGate, a novel representation learning solution that effectively embeds both logic function and structural information of a circuit as vectors on each gate. Specifically, we propose transforming circuits into unified and-inverter graph format for learning and using signal probabilities as the supervision task in DeepGate. We then introduce a novel graph neural network that uses strong inductive biases in practical circuits as learning priors for signal probability prediction. Our experimental results show the efficacy and generalization capability of DeepGate.

The task of 2D human pose estimation is challenging as the number of keypoints is typically large (~ 17) and this necessitates the use of robust neural network architectures and training pipelines that can capture the relevant features from the input image. These features are then aggregated to make accurate heatmap predictions from which the final keypoints of human body parts can be inferred. Many papers in literature use CNN-based architectures for the backbone, and/or combine it with a transformer, after which the features are aggregated to make the final keypoint predictions [1]. In this paper, we consider the recently proposed Bottleneck Transformers [2], which combine CNN and multi-head self attention (MHSA) layers effectively, and we integrate it with a Transformer encoder and apply it to the task of 2D human pose estimation. We consider different backbone architectures and pre-train them using the DINO self-supervised learning method [3], this pre-training is found to improve the overall prediction accuracy. We call our model BTranspose, and experiments show that on the COCO validation set, our model achieves an AP of 76.4, which is competitive with other methods such as [1] and has fewer network parameters. Furthermore, we also present the dependencies of the final predicted keypoints on both the MHSA block and the Transformer encoder layers, providing clues on the image sub-regions the network attends to at the mid and high levels.

In order to make autonomous driving a reality, artificial neural networks have to work reliably in the open-world. However, the open-world is vast and continuously changing, so it is not technically feasible to collect and annotate training datasets which accurately represent this domain. Therefore, there are always domain gaps between training datasets and the open-world which must be understood. In this work, we investigate the domain gaps between high-resolution and low-resolution LiDAR sensors in object detection networks. Using a unique dataset, which enables us to study sensor resolution domain gaps independent of other effects, we show two distinct domain gaps - an inference domain gap and a training domain gap. The inference domain gap is characterised by a strong dependence on the number of LiDAR points per object, while the training gap shows no such dependence. These fndings show that different approaches are required to close these inference and training domain gaps.

The increasing luminosities of future data taking at Large Hadron Collider and next generation collider experiments require an unprecedented amount of simulated events to be produced. Such large scale productions demand a significant amount of valuable computing resources. This brings a demand to use new approaches to event generation and simulation of detector responses. In this paper, we discuss the application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to the simulation of the LHCb experiment events. We emphasize main pitfalls in the application of GANs and study the systematic effects in detail. The presented results are based on the Geant4 simulation of the LHCb Cherenkov detector.

Invariance principle-based methods, for example, Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), have recently emerged as promising approaches for Domain Generalization (DG). Despite the promising theory, invariance principle-based approaches fail in common classification tasks due to the mixture of the true invariant features and the spurious invariant features. In this paper, we propose a framework based on the conditional entropy minimization principle to filter out the spurious invariant features leading to a new algorithm with a better generalization capability. We theoretically prove that under some particular assumptions, the representation function can precisely recover the true invariant features. In addition, we also show that the proposed approach is closely related to the well-known Information Bottleneck (IB) framework. Both the theoretical and numerical results are provided to justify our approach.

Estimating the effects of continuous-valued interventions from observational data is critically important in fields such as climate science, healthcare, and economics. Recent work focuses on designing neural-network architectures and regularization functions to allow for scalable estimation of average and individual-level dose response curves from high-dimensional, large-sample data. Such methodologies assume ignorability (all confounding variables are observed) and positivity (all levels of treatment can be observed for every unit described by a given covariate value), which are especially challenged in the continuous treatment regime. Developing scalable sensitivity and uncertainty analyses that allow us to understand the ignorance induced in our estimates when these assumptions are relaxed receives less attention. Here, we develop a continuous treatment-effect marginal sensitivity model (CMSM) and derive bounds that agree with both the observed data and a researcher-defined level of hidden confounding. We introduce a scalable algorithm to derive the bounds and uncertainty-aware deep models to efficiently estimate these bounds for high-dimensional, large-sample observational data. We validate our methods using both synthetic and real-world experiments. For the latter, we work in concert with climate scientists interested in evaluating the climatological impacts of human emissions on cloud properties using satellite observations from the past 15 years: a finite-data problem known to be complicated by the presence of a multitude of unobserved confounders.

NOTE: This preprint has a flawed theoretical formulation. Please avoid it and refer to the ICLR22 publication https://openreview.net/forum?id=q7n2RngwOM. Also, arXiv:2109.15062 contains some new ideas on unobserved Confounding. As an important problem of causal inference, we discuss the identification and estimation of treatment effects under unobserved confounding. Representing the confounder as a latent variable, we propose Intact-VAE, a new variant of variational autoencoder (VAE), motivated by the prognostic score that is sufficient for identifying treatment effects. We theoretically show that, under certain settings, treatment effects are identified by our model, and further, based on the identifiability of our model (i.e., determinacy of representation), our VAE is a consistent estimator with representation balanced for treatment groups. Experiments on (semi-)synthetic datasets show state-of-the-art performance under diverse settings.

For autonomous quadruped robot navigation in various complex environments, a typical SOTA system is composed of four main modules -- mapper, global planner, local planner, and command-tracking controller -- in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we build a robust and safe local planner which is designed to generate a velocity plan to track a coarsely planned path from the global planner. Previous works used waypoint-based methods (e.g. Proportional-Differential control and pure pursuit) which simplify the path tracking problem to local point-goal navigation. However, they suffer from frequent collisions in geometrically complex and narrow environments because of two reasons; the global planner uses a coarse and inaccurate model and the local planner is unable to track the global plan sufficiently well. Currently, deep learning methods are an appealing alternative because they can learn safety and path feasibility from experience more accurately. However, existing deep learning methods are not capable of planning for a long horizon. In this work, we propose a learning-based fully autonomous navigation framework composed of three innovative elements: a learned forward dynamics model (FDM), an online sampling-based model-predictive controller, and an informed trajectory sampler (ITS). Using our framework, a quadruped robot can autonomously navigate in various complex environments without a collision and generate a smoother command plan compared to the baseline method. Furthermore, our method can reactively handle unexpected obstacles on the planned path and avoid them. Project page https://awesomericky.github.io/projects/FDM_ITS_navigation/.

Remote-sensing (RS) Change Detection (CD) aims to detect "changes of interest" from co-registered bi-temporal images. The performance of existing deep supervised CD methods is attributed to the large amounts of annotated data used to train the networks. However, annotating large amounts of remote sensing images is labor-intensive and expensive, particularly with bi-temporal images, as it requires pixel-wise comparisons by a human expert. On the other hand, we often have access to unlimited unlabeled multi-temporal RS imagery thanks to ever-increasing earth observation programs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to leverage the information from unlabeled bi-temporal images to improve the performance of CD approaches. More specifically, we propose a semi-supervised CD model in which we formulate an unsupervised CD loss in addition to the supervised Cross-Entropy (CE) loss by constraining the output change probability map of a given unlabeled bi-temporal image pair to be consistent under the small random perturbations applied on the deep feature difference map that is obtained by subtracting their latent feature representations. Experiments conducted on two publicly available CD datasets show that the proposed semi-supervised CD method can reach closer to the performance of supervised CD even with access to as little as 10% of the annotated training data. Code available at https://github.com/wgcban/SemiCD

We provide a general framework for constructing probability distributions on Riemannian manifolds, taking advantage of area-preserving maps and isometries. Control over distributions' properties, such as parameters, symmetry and modality yield a family of flexible distributions that are straightforward to sample from, suitable for use within Monte Carlo algorithms and latent variable models, such as autoencoders. As an illustration, we empirically validate our approach by utilizing our proposed distributions within a variational autoencoder and a latent space network model. Finally, we take advantage of the generalized description of this framework to posit questions for future work.

Pseudo-labels are confident predictions made on unlabeled target data by a classifier trained on labeled source data. They are widely used for adapting a model to unlabeled data, e.g., in a semi-supervised learning setting. Our key insight is that pseudo-labels are naturally imbalanced due to intrinsic data similarity, even when a model is trained on balanced source data and evaluated on balanced target data. If we address this previously unknown imbalanced classification problem arising from pseudo-labels instead of ground-truth training labels, we could remove model biases towards false majorities created by pseudo-labels. We propose a novel and effective debiased learning method with pseudo-labels, based on counterfactual reasoning and adaptive margins: The former removes the classifier response bias, whereas the latter adjusts the margin of each class according to the imbalance of pseudo-labels. Validated by extensive experimentation, our simple debiased learning delivers significant accuracy gains over the state-of-the-art on ImageNet-1K: 26% for semi-supervised learning with 0.2% annotations and 9% for zero-shot learning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/frank-xwang/debiased-pseudo-labeling.

Data augmentation via voice conversion (VC) has been successfully applied to low-resource expressive text-to-speech (TTS) when only neutral data for the target speaker are available. Although the quality of VC is crucial for this approach, it is challenging to learn a stable VC model because the amount of data is limited in low-resource scenarios, and highly expressive speech has large acoustic variety. To address this issue, we propose a novel data augmentation method that combines pitch-shifting and VC techniques. Because pitch-shift data augmentation enables the coverage of a variety of pitch dynamics, it greatly stabilizes training for both VC and TTS models, even when only 1,000 utterances of the target speaker's neutral data are available. Subjective test results showed that a FastSpeech 2-based emotional TTS system with the proposed method improved naturalness and emotional similarity compared with conventional methods.

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the combination of machine learning and logical reasoning in inventing advanced artificial intelligence technologies. One-step abductive multi-target learning (OSAMTL), an approach that only combines machine learning and logical reasoning in a one-step balanced way, has as well shown its effectiveness in handling complex noisy labels of a single noisy sample in medical histopathology whole slide image analysis (MHWSIA). However, OSAMTL is not suitable for the situation where diverse noisy samples (DiNS) are provided for a learning task. In this paper, giving definition of DiNS, we propose one-step abductive multi-target learning with DiNS (OSAMTL-DiNS) to expand the original OSAMTL to handle complex noisy labels of DiNS. Applying OSAMTL-DiNS to tumour segmentation for breast cancer in MHWSIA, we show that OSAMTL-DiNS is able to enable various state-of-the-art approaches for learning from noisy labels to achieve more rational predictions.  ( 2 min )

Much attention has been paid to dynamical simulation and quantum machine learning (QML) independently as applications for quantum advantage, while the possibility of using QML to enhance dynamical simulations has not been thoroughly investigated. Here we develop a framework for using QML methods to simulate quantum dynamics on near-term quantum hardware. We use generalization bounds, which bound the error a machine learning model makes on unseen data, to rigorously analyze the training data requirements of an algorithm within this framework. This provides a guarantee that our algorithm is resource-efficient, both in terms of qubit and data requirements. Our numerics exhibit efficient scaling with problem size, and we simulate 20 times longer than Trotterization on IBMQ-Bogota.  ( 2 min )

Support vector machines (SVMs) are popular learning algorithms to deal with binary classification problems. They traditionally assume equal misclassification costs for each class; however, real-world problems may have an uneven class distribution. This article introduces EBCS-SVM: evolutionary bilevel cost-sensitive SVMs. EBCS-SVM handles imbalanced classification problems by simultaneously learning the support vectors and optimizing the SVM hyperparameters, which comprise the kernel parameter and misclassification costs. The resulting optimization problem is a bilevel problem, where the lower level determines the support vectors and the upper level the hyperparameters. This optimization problem is solved using an evolutionary algorithm (EA) at the upper level and sequential minimal optimization (SMO) at the lower level. These two methods work in a nested fashion, that is, the optimal support vectors help guide the search of the hyperparameters, and the lower level is initialized based on previous successful solutions. The proposed method is assessed using 70 datasets of imbalanced classification and compared with several state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results, supported by a Bayesian test, provided evidence of the effectiveness of EBCS-SVM when working with highly imbalanced datasets.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we present a new approach for feature fusion between RGB and LWIR Thermal images for the task of semantic segmentation for driving perception. We propose DooDLeNet, a double DeepLab architecture with specialized encoder-decoders for thermal and color modalities and a shared decoder for final segmentation. We combine two strategies for feature fusion: confidence weighting and correlation weighting. We report state-of-the-art mean IoU results on the MF dataset.  ( 2 min )

Image-based characterization and disease understanding involve integrative analysis of morphological, spatial, and topological information across biological scales. The development of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) has created the opportunity to address this information complexity via graph-driven architectures, since GCNs can perform feature aggregation, interaction, and reasoning with remarkable flexibility and efficiency. These GCNs capabilities have spawned a new wave of research in medical imaging analysis with the overarching goal of improving quantitative disease understanding, monitoring, and diagnosis. Yet daunting challenges remain for designing the important image-to-graph transformation for multi-modality medical imaging and gaining insights into model interpretation and enhanced clinical decision support. In this review, we present recent GCNs developments in the context of medical image analysis including imaging data from radiology and histopathology. We discuss the fast-growing use of graph network architectures in medical image analysis to improve disease diagnosis and patient outcomes in clinical practice. To foster cross-disciplinary research, we present GCNs technical advancements, emerging medical applications, identify common challenges in the use of image-based GCNs and their extensions in model interpretation, large-scale benchmarks that promise to transform the scope of medical image studies and related graph-driven medical research.  ( 2 min )

Discrete-time modeling of acoustic, mechanical and electrical systems is a prominent topic in the musical signal processing literature. Such models are mostly derived by discretizing a mathematical model, given in terms of ordinary or partial differential equations, using established techniques. Recent work has applied the techniques of machine-learning to construct such models automatically from data for the case of systems which have lumped states described by scalar values, such as electrical circuits. In this work, we examine how similar techniques are able to construct models of systems which have spatially distributed rather than lumped states. We describe several novel recurrent neural network structures, and show how they can be thought of as an extension of modal techniques. As a proof of concept, we generate synthetic data for three physical systems and show that the proposed network structures can be trained with this data to reproduce the behavior of these systems.

Compared with other imaging modalities, intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) has significant advantages for guiding percutaneous coronary interventions. To aid IVOCT research studies, we developed the Optical Coherence TOmography PlaqUe and Stent (OCTOPUS) analysis software. To automate image analysis results, the software includes several important algorithmic steps: pre-processing, deep learning plaque segmentation, machine learning identification of stent struts, and registration of pullbacks. Interactive visualization and manual editing of segmentations were included in the software. Quantifications include stent deployment characteristics (e.g., stent strut malapposition), strut level analysis, calcium angle, and calcium thickness measurements. Interactive visualizations include (x,y) anatomical, en face, and longitudinal views with optional overlays. Underlying plaque segmentation algorithm yielded excellent pixel-wise results (86.2% sensitivity and 0.781 F1 score). Using OCTOPUS on 34 new pullbacks, we determined that following automated segmentation, only 13% and 23% of frames needed any manual touch up for detailed lumen and calcification labeling, respectively. Only up to 3.8% of plaque pixels were modified, leading to an average editing time of only 7.5 seconds/frame, an approximately 80% reduction compared to manual analysis. Regarding stent analysis, sensitivity and precision were both greater than 90%, and each strut was successfully classified as either covered or uncovered with high sensitivity (94%) and specificity (90%). We introduced and evaluated the clinical application of a highly automated software package, OCTOPUS, for quantitative plaque and stent analysis in IVOCT images. The software is currently used as an offline tool for research purposes; however, the software's embedded algorithms may also be useful for real-time treatment planning.  ( 2 min )

The freeform architectural modeling process often involves two important stages: concept design and digital modeling. In the first stage, architects usually sketch the overall 3D shape and the panel layout on a physical or digital paper briefly. In the second stage, a digital 3D model is created using the sketch as a reference. The digital model needs to incorporate geometric requirements for its components, such as the planarity of panels due to consideration of construction costs, which can make the modeling process more challenging. In this work, we present a novel sketch-based system to bridge the concept design and digital modeling of freeform roof-like shapes represented as planar quadrilateral (PQ) meshes. Our system allows the user to sketch the surface boundary and contour lines under axonometric projection and supports the sketching of occluded regions. In addition, the user can sketch feature lines to provide directional guidance to the PQ mesh layout. Given the 2D sketch input, we propose a deep neural network to infer in real-time the underlying surface shape along with a dense conjugate direction field, both of which are used to extract the final PQ mesh. To train and validate our network, we generate a large synthetic dataset that mimics architect sketching of freeform quadrilateral patches. The effectiveness and usability of our system are demonstrated with quantitative and qualitative evaluation as well as user studies.  ( 2 min )

Given an increasingly volatile climate, the relationship between weather and transit ridership has drawn increasing interest. However, challenges stemming from spatio-temporal dependency and non-stationarity have not been fully addressed in modelling and predicting transit ridership under the influence of weather conditions especially with the traditional statistical approaches. Drawing on three-month smart card data in Brisbane, Australia, this research adopts and assesses a suite of machine-learning algorithms, i.e., random forest, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Tweedie XGBoost, to model and predict near real-time bus ridership in relation to sudden change of weather conditions. The study confirms that there indeed exists a significant level of spatio-temporal variability of weather-ridership relationship, which produces equally dynamic patterns of prediction errors. Further comparison of model performance suggests that Tweedie XGBoost outperforms the other two machine-learning algorithms in generating overall more accurate prediction outcomes in space and time. Future research may advance the current study by drawing on larger data sets and applying more advanced machine and deep-learning approaches to provide more enhanced evidence for real-time operation of transit systems.  ( 2 min )

The 2021 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE21) was the latest cycle of the ongoing evaluation series conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) since 1996. It was the second large-scale multimodal speaker/person recognition evaluation organized by NIST (the first one being SRE19). Similar to SRE19, it featured two core evaluation tracks, namely audio and audio-visual, as well as an optional visual track. In addition to offering fixed and open training conditions, it also introduced new challenges for the community, thanks to a new multimodal (i.e., audio, video, and selfie images) and multilingual (i.e., with multilingual speakers) corpus, termed WeCanTalk, collected outside North America by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). These challenges included: 1) trials (target and non-target) with enrollment and test segments originating from different domains (i.e., telephony versus video), and 2) trials (target and non-target) with enrollment and test segments spoken in different languages (i.e., cross-lingual trials). This paper presents an overview of SRE21 including the tasks, performance metric, data, evaluation protocol, results and system performance analyses. A total of 23 organizations (forming 15 teams) from academia and industry participated in SRE21 and submitted 158 valid system outputs. Evaluation results indicate: audio-visual fusion produce substantial gains in performance over audio-only or visual-only systems; top performing speaker and face recognition systems exhibited comparable performance under the matched domain conditions present in this evaluation; and, the use of complex neural network architectures (e.g., ResNet) along with angular losses with margin, data augmentation, as well as long duration fine-tuning contributed to notable performance improvements for the audio-only speaker recognition task.  ( 2 min )

In this work we examine the classification accuracy and robustness of a state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applied to the morphological classification of radio galaxies. We test if SSL with fewer labels can achieve test accuracies comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art and whether this holds when incorporating previously unseen data. We find that for the radio galaxy classification problem considered, SSL provides additional regularisation and outperforms the baseline test accuracy. However, in contrast to model performance metrics reported on computer science benchmarking data-sets, we find that improvement is limited to a narrow range of label volumes, with performance falling off rapidly at low label volumes. Additionally, we show that SSL does not improve model calibration, regardless of whether classification is improved. Moreover, we find that when different underlying catalogues drawn from the same radio survey are used to provide the labelled and unlabelled data-sets required for SSL, a significant drop in classification performance is observered, highlighting the difficulty of applying SSL techniques under dataset shift. We show that a class-imbalanced unlabelled data pool negatively affects performance through prior probability shift, which we suggest may explain this performance drop, and that using the Frechet Distance between labelled and unlabelled data-sets as a measure of data-set shift can provide a prediction of model performance, but that for typical radio galaxy data-sets with labelled sample volumes of O(1000), the sample variance associated with this technique is high and the technique is in general not sufficiently robust to replace a train-test cycle.  ( 2 min )

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for general continuous space-time stochastic control problems has been elusive. This paper closes the gap by proposing a proximal gradient algorithm for feedback controls of finite-time horizon stochastic control problems. The state dynamics are continuous time nonlinear diffusions with controlled drift and possibly degenerate noise, and the objectives are nonconvex in the state and nonsmooth in the control. We prove under suitable conditions that the algorithm converges linearly to a stationary point of the control problem, and is stable with respect to policy updates by approximate gradient steps. The convergence result justifies the recent reinforcement learning heuristics that adding entropy regularization or a fictitious discount factor to the optimization objective accelerates the convergence of policy gradient methods. The proof exploits careful regularity estimates of backward stochastic differential equations.  ( 2 min )

Machine learning training methods depend plentifully and intricately on hyperparameters, motivating automated strategies for their optimisation. Many existing algorithms restart training for each new hyperparameter choice, at considerable computational cost. Some hypergradient-based one-pass methods exist, but these either cannot be applied to arbitrary optimiser hyperparameters (such as learning rates and momenta) or take several times longer to train than their base models. We extend these existing methods to develop an approximate hypergradient-based hyperparameter optimiser which is applicable to any continuous hyperparameter appearing in a differentiable model weight update, yet requires only one training episode, with no restarts. We also provide a motivating argument for convergence to the true hypergradient, and perform tractable gradient-based optimisation of independent learning rates for each model parameter. Our method performs competitively from varied random hyperparameter initialisations on several UCI datasets and Fashion-MNIST (using a one-layer MLP), Penn Treebank (using an LSTM) and CIFAR-10 (using a ResNet-18), in time only 2-3x greater than vanilla training.

We describe how the Fink broker early supernova Ia classifier optimizes its ML classifications by employing an active learning (AL) strategy. We demonstrate the feasibility of implementation of such strategies in the current Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) public alert data stream. We compare the performance of two AL strategies: uncertainty sampling and random sampling. Our pipeline consists of 3 stages: feature extraction, classification and learning strategy. Starting from an initial sample of 10 alerts (5 SN Ia and 5 non-Ia), we let the algorithm identify which alert should be added to the training sample. The system is allowed to evolve through 300 iterations. Our data set consists of 23 840 alerts from the ZTF with confirmed classification via cross-match with SIMBAD database and the Transient name server (TNS), 1 600 of which were SNe Ia (1 021 unique objects). The data configuration, after the learning cycle was completed, consists of 310 alerts for training and 23 530 for testing. Averaging over 100 realizations, the classifier achieved 89% purity and 54% efficiency. From 01/November/2020 to 31/October/2021 Fink has applied its early supernova Ia module to the ZTF stream and communicated promising SN Ia candidates to the TNS. From the 535 spectroscopically classified Fink candidates, 459 (86%) were proven to be SNe Ia. Our results confirm the effectiveness of active learning strategies for guiding the construction of optimal training samples for astronomical classifiers. It demonstrates in real data that the performance of learning algorithms can be highly improved without the need of extra computational resources or overwhelmingly large training samples. This is, to our knowledge, the first application of AL to real alerts data.

Recurrent neural networks have seen widespread use in modeling dynamical systems in varied domains such as weather prediction, text prediction and several others. Often one wishes to supplement the experimentally observed dynamics with prior knowledge or intuition about the system. While the recurrent nature of these networks allows them to model arbitrarily long memories in the time series used in training, it makes it harder to impose prior knowledge or intuition through generic constraints. In this work, we present a path sampling approach based on principle of Maximum Caliber that allows us to include generic thermodynamic or kinetic constraints into recurrent neural networks. We show the method here for a widely used type of recurrent neural network known as long short-term memory network in the context of supplementing time series collected from different application domains. These include classical Molecular Dynamics of a protein and Monte Carlo simulations of an open quantum system continuously losing photons to the environment and displaying Rabi oscillations. Our method can be easily generalized to other generative artificial intelligence models and to generic time series in different areas of physical and social sciences, where one wishes to supplement limited data with intuition or theory based corrections.

We study the theory of neural network (NN) from the lens of classical nonparametric regression problems with a focus on NN's ability to adaptively estimate functions with heterogeneous smoothness -- a property of functions in Besov or Bounded Variation (BV) classes. Existing work on this problem requires tuning the NN architecture based on the function spaces and sample sizes. We consider a "Parallel NN" variant of deep ReLU networks and show that the standard weight decay is equivalent to promoting the $\ell_p$-sparsity ($0<p<1$) of the coefficient vector of an end-to-end learned function bases, i.e., a dictionary. Using this equivalence, we further establish that by tuning only the weight decay, such Parallel NN achieves an estimation error arbitrarily close to the minimax rates for both the Besov and BV classes. Notably, it gets exponentially closer to minimax optimal as the NN gets deeper. Our research sheds new lights on why depth matters and how NNs are more powerful than kernel methods.

Feature-based transfer is one of the most effective methodologies for transfer learning. Existing studies usually assume that the learned new feature representation is \emph{domain-invariant}, and thus train a transfer model $\mathcal{M}$ on the source domain. In this paper, we consider a more realistic scenario where the new feature representation is suboptimal and small divergence still exists across domains. We propose a new transfer model called Randomized Transferable Machine (RTM) to handle such small divergence of domains. Specifically, we work on the new source and target data learned from existing feature-based transfer methods. The key idea is to enlarge source training data populations by randomly corrupting the new source data using some noises, and then train a transfer model $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$ that performs well on all the corrupted source data populations. In principle, the more corruptions are made, the higher the probability of the new target data can be covered by the constructed source data populations, and thus better transfer performance can be achieved by $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$. An ideal case is with infinite corruptions, which however is infeasible in reality. We develop a marginalized solution that enables to train an $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$ without conducting any corruption but equivalent to be trained using infinite source noisy data populations. We further propose two instantiations of $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$, which theoretically show the transfer superiority over the conventional transfer model $\mathcal{M}$. More importantly, both instantiations have closed-form solutions, leading to a fast and efficient training process. Experiments on various real-world transfer tasks show that RTM is a promising transfer model.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and their variants have achieved great success in dealing with graph-structured data. Nevertheless, it is well known that deep GCNs suffer from the over-smoothing problem, where node representations tend to be indistinguishable as more layers are stacked up. The theoretical research to date on deep GCNs has focused primarily on expressive power rather than trainability, an optimization perspective. Compared to expressivity, trainability attempts to address a more fundamental question: Given a sufficiently expressive space of models, can we successfully find a good solution via gradient descent-based optimizers? This work fills this gap by exploiting the Graph Neural Tangent Kernel (GNTK), which governs the optimization trajectory under gradient descent for wide GCNs. We formulate the asymptotic behaviors of GNTK in the large depth, which enables us to reveal the dropping trainability of wide and deep GCNs at an exponential rate in the optimization process. Additionally, we extend our theoretical framework to analyze residual connection-based techniques, which are found to be merely able to mitigate the exponential decay of trainability mildly. Inspired by our theoretical insights on trainability, we propose Critical DropEdge, a connectivity-aware and graph-adaptive sampling method, to alleviate the exponential decay problem more fundamentally. Experimental evaluation consistently confirms using our proposed method can achieve better results compared to relevant counterparts with both infinite-width and finite-width.

Modeling complex phenomena typically involves the use of both discrete and continuous variables. Such a setting applies across a wide range of problems, from identifying trends in time-series data to performing effective compositional scene understanding in images. Here, we propose Hybrid Memoised Wake-Sleep (HMWS), an algorithm for effective inference in such hybrid discrete-continuous models. Prior approaches to learning suffer as they need to perform repeated expensive inner-loop discrete inference. We build on a recent approach, Memoised Wake-Sleep (MWS), which alleviates part of the problem by memoising discrete variables, and extend it to allow for a principled and effective way to handle continuous variables by learning a separate recognition model used for importance-sampling based approximate inference and marginalization. We evaluate HMWS in the GP-kernel learning and 3D scene understanding domains, and show that it outperforms current state-of-the-art inference methods.

Generalization bounds are a critical tool to assess the training data requirements of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Recent work has established guarantees for in-distribution generalization of quantum neural networks (QNNs), where training and testing data are assumed to be drawn from the same data distribution. However, there are currently no results on out-of-distribution generalization in QML, where we require a trained model to perform well even on data drawn from a distribution different from the training distribution. In this work, we prove out-of-distribution generalization for the task of learning an unknown unitary using a QNN and for a broad class of training and testing distributions. In particular, we show that one can learn the action of a unitary on entangled states using only product state training data. We numerically illustrate this by showing that the evolution of a Heisenberg spin chain can be learned using only product training states. Since product states can be prepared using only single-qubit gates, this advances the prospects of learning quantum dynamics using near term quantum computers and quantum experiments, and further opens up new methods for both the classical and quantum compilation of quantum circuits.  ( 2 min )

For multi-band wireless ad hoc networks of multiple users, an anti-jamming game between the users and a jammer is studied. In this game, the users (resp. jammer) want to maximize (resp. minimize) the expected rewards of the users taking into account various factors such as communication rate, hopping cost, and jamming loss. We analyze the arms race of the game and derive an optimal frequency hopping policy at each stage of the arms race based on the Markov decision process (MDP). It is analytically shown that the arms race reaches an equilibrium after a few rounds, and a frequency hopping policy and a jamming strategy at the equilibrium are characterized. We propose two kinds of collision avoidance protocols to ensure that at most one user communicates in each frequency band, and provide various numerical results that show the effects of the reward parameters and collision avoidance protocols on the optimal frequency hopping policy and the expected rewards at the equilibrium. Moreover, we discuss about equilibria for the case where the jammer adopts some unpredictable jamming strategies.

Reliable wireless communication between the autonomously driving cars is one of the fundamental needs for guaranteeing passenger safety and comfort. However, when the number of communicating cars increases, the transmission quality may be significantly degraded due to too high occupancy radio of the used frequency band. In this paper, we concentrate on the autonomous vehicle-platooning use-case, where intra-platoon communication is done in the dynamically selected frequency band, other than nominally devoted for such purposes. The carrier selection is done in a flexible manner with the support of the context database located at the roadside unit (edge of wireless communication infrastructure). However, as the database delivers only context information to the platoons' leaders, the final decision is made separately by the individual platoons, following the suggestions made by the artificial intelligence algorithms. In this work, we concentrate on a lightweight Q-learning solution, that could be successfully implemented in each car for dynamic channel selection.

We propose a simple scheme for merging two neural networks trained with different starting initialization into a single one with the same size as the original ones. We do this by carefully selecting channels from each input network. Our procedure might be used as a finalization step after one tries multiple starting seeds to avoid an unlucky one. We also show that training two networks and merging them leads to better performance than training a single network for an extended period of time. Availability: https://github.com/fmfi-compbio/neural-network-merging

We propose OUR-GAN, the first one-shot ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image synthesis framework that generates non-repetitive images with 4K or higher resolution from a single training image. OUR-GAN generates a visually coherent image at low resolution and then gradually increases the resolution by super-resolution. Since OUR-GAN learns from a real UHR image, it can synthesize large-scale shapes with fine details while maintaining long-range coherence, which is difficult with conventional generative models that generate large images based on the patch distribution learned from relatively small images. OUR-GAN applies seamless subregion-wise super-resolution that synthesizes 4k or higher UHR images with limited memory, preventing discontinuity at the boundary. Additionally, OUR-GAN improves visual coherence maintaining diversity by adding vertical positional embeddings to the feature maps. In experiments on the ST4K and RAISE datasets, OUR-GAN exhibited improved fidelity, visual coherency, and diversity compared with existing methods. The synthesized images are presented at https://anonymous-62348.github.io.

We present a system for interactive examination of learned security policies. It allows a user to traverse episodes of Markov decision processes in a controlled manner and to track the actions triggered by security policies. Similar to a software debugger, a user can continue or or halt an episode at any time step and inspect parameters and probability distributions of interest. The system enables insight into the structure of a given policy and in the behavior of a policy in edge cases. We demonstrate the system with a network intrusion use case. We examine the evolution of an IT infrastructure's state and the actions prescribed by security policies while an attack occurs. The policies for the demonstration have been obtained through a reinforcement learning approach that includes a simulation system where policies are incrementally learned and an emulation system that produces statistics that drive the simulation runs.

WLANs, which have overtaken wired networks to become the primary means of connecting devices to the Internet, are prone to performance issues due to the scarcity of space in the radio spectrum. As a response, IEEE 802.11ax and subsequent amendments aim at increasing the spatial reuse of a radio channel by allowing the dynamic update of two key parameters in wireless transmission: the transmission power (TX_POWER) and the sensitivity threshold (OBSS_PD). In this paper, we present INSPIRE, a distributed solution performing local Bayesian optimizations based on Gaussian processes to improve the spatial reuse in WLANs. INSPIRE makes no explicit assumptions about the topology of WLANs and favors altruistic behaviors of the access points, leading them to find adequate configurations of their TX_POWER and OBSS_PD parameters for the "greater good" of the WLANs. We demonstrate the superiority of INSPIRE over other state-of-the-art strategies using the ns-3 simulator and two examples inspired by real-life deployments of dense WLANs. Our results show that, in only a few seconds, INSPIRE is able to drastically increase the quality of service of operational WLANs by improving their fairness and throughput.

Cryptocurrencies are no longer just the preferred option for cybercriminal activities on darknets, due to the increasing adoption in mainstream applications. This is partly due to the transparency associated with the underpinning ledgers, where any individual can access the record of a transaction record on the public ledger. In this paper, we build a dataset comprising Bitcoin transactions between 12 July 2019 and 26 May 2021. This dataset (hereafter referred to as BABD-13) contains 13 types of Bitcoin addresses, 5 categories of indicators with 148 features, and 544,462 labeled data. We then use our proposed dataset on common machine learning models, namely: k-nearest neighbors algorithm, decision tree, random forest, multilayer perceptron, and XGBoost. The results show that the accuracy rates of these machine learning models on our proposed dataset are between 93.24% and 96.71%. We also analyze the proposed features and their relationships from the experiments, and propose a k-hop subgraph generation algorithm to extract a k-hop subgraph from the entire Bitcoin transaction graph constructed by the directed heterogeneous multigraph starting from a specific Bitcoin address node (e.g., a known transaction associated with a criminal investigation).

Transfer learning is a classic paradigm by which models pretrained on large "upstream" datasets are adapted to yield good results on "downstream" specialized datasets. Generally, more accurate models on the "upstream" dataset tend to provide better transfer accuracy "downstream". In this work, we perform an in-depth investigation of this phenomenon in the context of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on the ImageNet dataset, which have been pruned - that is, compressed by sparsifying their connections. We consider transfer using unstructured pruned models obtained by applying several state-of-the-art pruning methods, including magnitude-based, second-order, re-growth, lottery-ticket, and regularization approaches, in the context of twelve standard transfer tasks. In a nutshell, our study shows that sparse models can match or even outperform the transfer performance of dense models, even at high sparsities, and, while doing so, can lead to significant inference and even training speedups. At the same time, we observe and analyze significant differences in the behaviour of different pruning methods.

We study offline recommender learning from explicit rating feedback in the presence of selection bias. A current promising solution for the bias is the inverse propensity score (IPS) estimation. However, the performance of existing propensity-based methods can suffer significantly from the propensity estimation bias. In fact, most of the previous IPS-based methods require some amount of missing-completely-at-random (MCAR) data to accurately estimate the propensity. This leads to a critical self-contradiction; IPS is ineffective without MCAR data, even though it originally aims to learn recommenders from only missing-not-at-random feedback. To resolve this propensity contradiction, we derive a propensity-independent generalization error bound and propose a novel algorithm to minimize the theoretical bound via adversarial learning. Our theory and algorithm do not require a propensity estimation procedure, thereby leading to a well-performing rating predictor without the true propensity information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to a range of existing methods both in rating prediction and ranking metrics in practical settings without MCAR data.  ( 2 min )

Advances in deep vision techniques and ubiquity of smart cameras will drive the next generation of video analytics. However, video analytics applications consume vast amounts of energy as both deep learning techniques and cameras are power-hungry. In this paper, we focus on a parking video analytics platform and propose RL-CamSleep, a deep reinforcement learning-based technique, to actuate the cameras to reduce the energy footprint while retaining the system's utility. Our key insight is that many video-analytics applications do not always need to be operational, and we can design policies to activate video analytics only when necessary. Moreover, our work is complementary to existing work that focuses on improving hardware and software efficiency. We evaluate our approach on a city-scale parking dataset having 76 streets spread across the city. Our analysis demonstrates how streets have various parking patterns, highlighting the importance of an adaptive policy. Our approach can learn such an adaptive policy that can reduce the average energy consumption by 76.38% and achieve an average accuracy of more than 98% in performing video analytics.

Despite progress across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive solutions that route relevant information to the right node/operation at the right time in the grid represented by Transformer columns. To facilitate the learning of useful control flow, we propose two modifications to the Transformer architecture, copy gate and geometric attention. Our novel Neural Data Router (NDR) achieves 100% length generalization accuracy on the classic compositional table lookup task, as well as near-perfect accuracy on the simple arithmetic task and a new variant of ListOps testing for generalization across computational depths. NDR's attention and gating patterns tend to be interpretable as an intuitive form of neural routing. Our code is public.

Recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNN) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which aim to mislead DNNs by adding perturbations with small magnitude. To defend against such attacks, both empirical and theoretical defense approaches have been extensively studied for a single ML model. In this work, we aim to analyze and provide the certified robustness for ensemble ML models, together with the sufficient and necessary conditions of robustness for different ensemble protocols. Although ensemble models are shown more robust than a single model empirically; surprisingly, we find that in terms of the certified robustness the standard ensemble models only achieve marginal improvement compared to a single model. Thus, to explore the conditions that guarantee to provide certifiably robust ensemble ML models, we first prove that diversified gradient and large confidence margin are sufficient and necessary conditions for certifiably robust ensemble models under the model-smoothness assumption. We then provide the bounded model-smoothness analysis based on the proposed Ensemble-before-Smoothing strategy. We also prove that an ensemble model can always achieve higher certified robustness than a single base model under mild conditions. Inspired by the theoretical findings, we propose the lightweight Diversity Regularized Training (DRT) to train certifiably robust ensemble ML models. Extensive experiments show that our DRT enhanced ensembles can consistently achieve higher certified robustness than existing single and ensemble ML models, demonstrating the state-of-the-art certified L2-robustness on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet datasets.  ( 2 min )

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have been increasingly used in several fields to improve performance and the level of automation. In recent years, this use has exponentially increased due to the advancement of high-performance computing and the ever increasing size of data. One of such fields is that of hardware design; specifically the design of digital and analog integrated circuits~(ICs), where AI/ ML techniques have been extensively used to address ever-increasing design complexity, aggressive time-to-market, and the growing number of ubiquitous interconnected devices (IoT). However, the security concerns and issues related to IC design have been highly overlooked. In this paper, we summarize the state-of-the-art in AL/ML for circuit design/optimization, security and engineering challenges, research in security-aware CAD/EDA, and future research directions and needs for using AI/ML for security-aware circuit design.  ( 2 min )

Retrieving accurate semantic information in challenging high dynamic range (HDR) and high-speed conditions remains an open challenge for image-based algorithms due to severe image degradations. Event cameras promise to address these challenges since they feature a much higher dynamic range and are resilient to motion blur. Nonetheless, semantic segmentation with event cameras is still in its infancy which is chiefly due to the novelty of the sensor, and the lack of high-quality, labeled datasets. In this work, we introduce ESS, which tackles this problem by directly transferring the semantic segmentation task from existing labeled image datasets to unlabeled events via unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Compared to existing UDA methods, our approach aligns recurrent, motion-invariant event embeddings with image embeddings. For this reason, our method neither requires video data nor per-pixel alignment between images and events and, crucially, does not need to hallucinate motion from still images. Additionally, to spur further research in event-based semantic segmentation, we introduce DSEC-Semantic, the first large-scale event-based dataset with fine-grained labels. We show that using image labels alone, ESS outperforms existing UDA approaches, and when combined with event labels, it even outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches on both DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic. Finally, ESS is general-purpose, which unlocks the vast amount of existing labeled image datasets and paves the way for new and exciting research directions in new fields previously inaccessible for event cameras.  ( 2 min )

An ability to predict the popularity dynamics of individual items within a complex evolving system has important implications in a wide range of domains. Here we propose a deep learning attention mechanism to model the process through which individual items gain their popularity. We analyze the interpretability of the model with the four key phenomena confirmed independently in the previous studies of long-term popularity dynamics quantification, including the intrinsic quality, the aging effect, the recency effect and the Matthew effect. We analyze the effectiveness of introducing attention model in popularity dynamics prediction. Extensive experiments on a real-large citation data set demonstrate that the designed deep learning attention mechanism possesses remarkable power at predicting the long-term popularity dynamics. It consistently outperforms the existing methods, and achieves a significant performance improvement.  ( 2 min )

Active learning frameworks offer efficient data annotation without remarkable accuracy degradation. In other words, active learning starts training the model with a small size of labeled data while exploring the space of unlabeled data in order to select most informative samples to be labeled. Generally speaking, representing the uncertainty is crucial in any active learning framework, however, deep learning methods are not capable of either representing or manipulating model uncertainty. On the other hand, from the real world application perspective, uncertainty representation is getting more and more attention in the machine learning community. Deep Bayesian active learning frameworks and generally any Bayesian active learning settings, provide practical consideration in the model which allows training with small data while representing the model uncertainty for further efficient training. In this paper, we briefly survey recent advances in Bayesian active learning and in particular deep Bayesian active learning frameworks.

Self-adaptive systems frequently use tactics to perform adaptations. Tactic examples include the implementation of additional security measures when an intrusion is detected, or activating a cooling mechanism when temperature thresholds are surpassed. Tactic volatility occurs in real-world systems and is defined as variable behavior in the attributes of a tactic, such as its latency or cost. A system's inability to effectively account for tactic volatility adversely impacts its efficiency and resiliency against the dynamics of real-world environments. To enable systems' efficiency against tactic volatility, we propose a Tactic Volatility Aware (TVA-E) process utilizing evolved Recurrent Neural Networks (eRNN) to provide accurate tactic predictions. TVA-E is also the first known process to take advantage of uncertainty reduction tactics to provide additional information to the decision-making process and reduce uncertainty. TVA-E easily integrates into popular adaptation processes enabling it to immediately benefit a large number of existing self-adaptive systems. Simulations using 52,106 tactic records demonstrate that: I) eRNN is an effective prediction mechanism, II) TVA-E represents an improvement over existing state-of-the-art processes in accounting for tactic volatility, and III) Uncertainty reduction tactics are beneficial in accounting for tactic volatility. The developed dataset and tool can be found at https://tacticvolatility.github.io/

We propose a parameter sharing method for Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017). The proposed approach relaxes a widely used technique, which shares parameters for one layer with all layers such as Universal Transformers (Dehghani et al., 2019), to increase the efficiency in the computational time. We propose three strategies: Sequence, Cycle, and Cycle (rev) to assign parameters to each layer. Experimental results show that the proposed strategies are efficient in the parameter size and computational time. Moreover, we indicate that the proposed strategies are also effective in the configuration where we use many training data such as the recent WMT competition.  ( 2 min )

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for graph representation learning. Despite their rapid development, GNNs also faces some challenges, such as over-fitting, over-smoothing, and non-robustness. Previous works indicate that these problems can be alleviated by random dropping methods, which integrate noises into models by randomly masking parts of the input. However, some open-ended problems of random dropping on GNNs remain to solve. First, it is challenging to find a universal method that are suitable for all cases considering the divergence of different datasets and models. Second, random noises introduced to GNNs cause the incomplete coverage of parameters and unstable training process. In this paper, we propose a novel random dropping method called DropMessage, which performs dropping operations directly on the message matrix and can be applied to any message-passing GNNs. Furthermore, we elaborate the superiority of DropMessage: it stabilizes the training process by reducing sample variance; it keeps information diversity from the perspective of information theory, which makes it a theoretical upper bound of other methods. Also, we unify existing random dropping methods into our framework and analyze their effects on GNNs. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct experiments that aims for multiple tasks on five public datasets and two industrial datasets with various backbone models. The experimental results show that DropMessage has both advantages of effectiveness and generalization.  ( 2 min )

Graph-based spatio-temporal neural networks are effective to model the spatial dependency among discrete points sampled irregularly from unstructured grids, thanks to the great expressiveness of graph neural networks. However, these models are usually spatially-transductive -- only fitting the signals for discrete spatial nodes fed in models but unable to generalize to `unseen' spatial points with zero-shot. In comparison, for forecasting tasks on continuous space such as temperature prediction on the earth's surface, the \textit{spatially-inductive} property allows the model to generalize to any point in the spatial domain, demonstrating models' ability to learn the underlying mechanisms or physics laws of the systems, rather than simply fit the signals. Besides, in temporal domains, \textit{irregularly-sampled} time series, e.g. data with missing values, urge models to be temporally-continuous. Motivated by the two issues, we propose a spatio-temporal framework based on neural operators for PDEs, which learn the underlying mechanisms governing the dynamics of spatially-continuous physical quantities. Experiments show our model's improved performance on forecasting spatially-continuous physic quantities, and its superior generalization to unseen spatial points and ability to handle temporally-irregular data.  ( 2 min )

We propose an analog implementation of the transcendental activation function leveraging two spin-orbit torque magnetoresistive random-access memory (SOT-MRAM) devices and a CMOS inverter. The proposed analog neuron circuit consumes 1.8-27x less power, and occupies 2.5-4931x smaller area, compared to the state-of-the-art analog and digital implementations. Moreover, the developed neuron can be readily integrated with memristive crossbars without requiring any intermediate signal conversion units. The architecture-level analyses show that a fully-analog in-memory computing (IMC) circuit that use our SOT-MRAM neuron along with an SOT-MRAM based crossbar can achieve more than 1.1x, 12x, and 13.3x reduction in power, latency, and energy, respectively, compared to a mixed-signal implementation with analog memristive crossbars and digital neurons. Finally, through cross-layer analyses, we provide a guide on how varying the device-level parameters in our neuron can affect the accuracy of multilayer perceptron (MLP) for MNIST classification.  ( 2 min )

We introduce a scattering covariance matrix which provides non-Gaussian models of time-series having stationary increments. A complex wavelet transform computes signal variations at each scale. Dependencies across scales are captured by the joint covariance across time and scales of complex wavelet coefficients and their modulus. This covariance is nearly diagonalized by a second wavelet transform, which defines the scattering covariance. We show that this set of moments characterizes a wide range of non-Gaussian properties of multi-scale processes. This is analyzed for a variety of processes, including fractional Brownian motions, Poisson, multifractal random walks and Hawkes processes. We prove that self-similar processes have a scattering covariance matrix which is scale invariant. This property can be estimated numerically and defines a class of wide-sense self-similar processes. We build maximum entropy models conditioned by scattering covariance coefficients, and generate new time-series with a microcanonical sampling algorithm. Applications are shown for highly non-Gaussian financial and turbulence time-series.  ( 2 min )

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are increasingly adopted to tackle ever-evolving high-profile network attacks, including DDoS, botnet, and ransomware, due to their unique ability to extract complex patterns hidden in data streams. These approaches are however routinely validated with data collected in the same environment, and their performance degrades when deployed in different network topologies and/or applied on previously unseen traffic, as we uncover. This suggests malicious/benign behaviors are largely learned superficially and ML-based Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) need revisiting, to be effective in practice. In this paper we dive into the mechanics of large-scale network attacks, with a view to understanding how to use ML for Network Intrusion Detection (NID) in a principled way. We reveal that, although cyberattacks vary significantly in terms of payloads, vectors and targets, their early stages, which are critical to successful attack outcomes, share many similarities and exhibit important temporal correlations. Therefore, we treat NID as a time-sensitive task and propose NetSentry, perhaps the first of its kind NIDS that builds on Bidirectional Asymmetric LSTM (Bi-ALSTM), an original ensemble of sequential neural models, to detect network threats before they spread. We cross-evaluate NetSentry using two practical datasets, training on one and testing on the other, and demonstrate F1 score gains above 33% over the state-of-the-art, as well as up to 3 times higher rates of detecting attacks such as XSS and web bruteforce. Further, we put forward a novel data augmentation technique that boosts the generalization abilities of a broad range of supervised deep learning algorithms, leading to average F1 score gains above 35%.  ( 2 min )

Infographics are an aesthetic visual representation of information following specific design principles of human perception. Designing infographics can be a tedious process for non-experts and time-consuming, even for professional designers. With the help of designers, we propose a semi-automated infographic framework for general structured and flow-based infographic design generation. For novice designers, our framework automatically creates and ranks infographic designs for a user-provided text with no requirement for design input. However, expert designers can still provide custom design inputs to customize the infographics. We will also contribute an individual visual group (VG) designs dataset (in SVG), along with a 1k complete infographic image dataset with segmented VGs in this work. Evaluation results confirm that by using our framework, designers from all expertise levels can generate generic infographic designs faster than existing methods while maintaining the same quality as hand-designed infographics templates.  ( 2 min )

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are a common type of Graph Neural Network (GNN), in which each node's representation is computed recursively by aggregating representations (messages) from its immediate neighbors akin to a star-shaped pattern. MPNNs are appealing for being efficient and scalable, how-ever their expressiveness is upper-bounded by the 1st-order Weisfeiler-Lehman isomorphism test (1-WL). In response, prior works propose highly expressive models at the cost of scalability and sometimes generalization performance. Our work stands between these two regimes: we introduce a general framework to uplift any MPNN to be more expressive, with limited scalability overhead and greatly improved practical performance. We achieve this by extending local aggregation in MPNNs from star patterns to general subgraph patterns (e.g.,k-egonets):in our framework, each node representation is computed as the encoding of a surrounding induced subgraph rather than encoding of immediate neighbors only (i.e. a star). We choose the subgraph encoder to be a GNN (mainly MPNNs, considering scalability) to design a general framework that serves as a wrapper to up-lift any GNN. We call our proposed method GNN-AK(GNN As Kernel), as the framework resembles a convolutional neural network by replacing the kernel with GNNs. Theoretically, we show that our framework is strictly more powerful than 1&2-WL, and is not less powerful than 3-WL. We also design subgraph sampling strategies which greatly reduce memory footprint and improve speed while maintaining performance. Our method sets new state-of-the-art performance by large margins for several well-known graph ML tasks; specifically, 0.08 MAE on ZINC,74.79% and 86.887% accuracy on CIFAR10 and PATTERN respectively.  ( 2 min )

The task of continual learning requires careful design of algorithms that can tackle catastrophic forgetting. However, the noisy label, which is inevitable in a real-world scenario, seems to exacerbate the situation. While very few studies have addressed the issue of continual learning under noisy labels, long training time and complicated training schemes limit their applications in most cases. In contrast, we propose a simple purification technique to effectively cleanse the online data stream that is both cost-effective and more accurate. After purification, we perform fine-tuning in a semi-supervised fashion that ensures the participation of all available samples. Training in this fashion helps us learn a better representation that results in state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Through extensive experimentation on 3 benchmark datasets, MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We achieve a 24.8% performance gain for CIFAR10 with 20% noise over previous SOTA methods. Our code is publicly available.  ( 2 min )

Email threat is a serious issue for enterprise security, which consists of various malicious scenarios, such as phishing, fraud, blackmail and malvertisement. Traditional anti-spam gateway commonly requires to maintain a greylist to filter out unexpected emails based on suspicious vocabularies existed in the mail subject and content. However, the signature-based approach cannot effectively discover novel and unknown suspicious emails that utilize various hot topics at present, such as COVID-19 and US election. To address the problem, in this paper, we present Holmes, an efficient and lightweight semantic based engine for anomalous email detection. Holmes can convert each event log of email to a sentence through word embedding then extract interesting items among them by novelty detection. Based on our observations, we claim that, in an enterprise environment, there is a stable relation between senders and receivers, but suspicious emails are commonly from unusual sources, which can be detected through the rareness selection. We evaluate the performance of Holmes in a real-world enterprise environment, in which it sends and receives around 5,000 emails each day. As a result, Holmes can achieve a high detection rate (output around 200 suspicious emails per day) and maintain a low false alarm rate for anomaly detection.  ( 3 min )

In this work, we compare different neural topic modeling methods in learning the topical propensities of different psychiatric conditions from the psychotherapy session transcripts parsed from speech recordings. We also incorporate temporal modeling to put this additional interpretability to action by parsing out topic similarities as a time series in a turn-level resolution. We believe this topic modeling framework can offer interpretable insights for the therapist to optimally decide his or her strategy and improve the psychotherapy effectiveness.  ( 2 min )

Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic "expansion" assumption, which states that a low probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.  ( 2 min )

Safe deployment of deep learning systems in critical real world applications requires models to make very few mistakes, and only under predictable circumstances. In this work, we address this problem using an abstaining classifier that is tuned to have $>$95% accuracy, and then identify the determinants of abstention using LIME. Essentially, we are training our model to learn the attributes of pathology reports that are likely to lead to incorrect classifications, albeit at the cost of reduced sensitivity. We demonstrate an abstaining classifier in a multitask setting for classifying cancer pathology reports from the NCI SEER cancer registries on six tasks of interest. For these tasks, we reduce the classification error rate by factors of 2--5 by abstaining on 25--45% of the reports. For the specific task of classifying cancer site, we are able to identify metastasis, reports involving lymph nodes, and discussion of multiple cancer sites as responsible for many of the classification mistakes, and observe that the extent and types of mistakes vary systematically with cancer site (e.g., breast, lung, and prostate). When combining across three of the tasks, our model classifies 50% of the reports with an accuracy greater than 95% for three of the six tasks\edit, and greater than 85% for all six tasks on the retained samples. Furthermore, we show that LIME provides a better determinant of classification than measures of word occurrence alone. By combining a deep abstaining classifier with feature identification using LIME, we are able to identify concepts responsible for both correctness and abstention when classifying cancer sites from pathology reports. The improvement of LIME over keyword searches is statistically significant, presumably because words are assessed in context and have been identified as a local determinant of classification.  ( 3 min )

Sequential Recommendation aims to predict the next item based on user behaviour. Recently, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been proposed to improve recommendation performance. However, most of existing SSL methods use a uniform data augmentation scheme, which loses the sequence correlation of an original sequence. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Learnable Model Augmentation self-supervised learning for sequential Recommendation (LMA4Rec). Specifically, LMA4Rec first takes model augmentation as a supplementary method for data augmentation to generate views. Then, LMA4Rec uses learnable Bernoulli dropout to implement model augmentation learnable operations. Next, self-supervised learning is used between the contrastive views to extract self-supervised signals from an original sequence. Finally, experiments on three public datasets show that the LMA4Rec method effectively improves sequential recommendation performance compared with baseline methods.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning on point clouds has received increased attention thanks to its wide applications in AR/VR and autonomous driving. These applications require low latency and high accuracy to provide real-time user experience and ensure user safety. Unlike conventional dense workloads, the sparse and irregular nature of point clouds poses severe challenges to running sparse CNNs efficiently on the general-purpose hardware. Furthermore, existing sparse acceleration techniques for 2D images do not translate to 3D point clouds. In this paper, we introduce TorchSparse, a high-performance point cloud inference engine that accelerates the sparse convolution computation on GPUs. TorchSparse directly optimizes the two bottlenecks of sparse convolution: irregular computation and data movement. It applies adaptive matrix multiplication grouping to trade computation for better regularity, achieving 1.4-1.5x speedup for matrix multiplication. It also optimizes the data movement by adopting vectorized, quantized and fused locality-aware memory access, reducing the memory movement cost by 2.7x. Evaluated on seven representative models across three benchmark datasets, TorchSparse achieves 1.6x and 1.5x measured end-to-end speedup over the state-of-the-art MinkowskiEngine and SpConv, respectively.  ( 2 min )

We explore future object prediction -- a challenging problem where all objects visible in a future video frame are to be predicted. We propose to tackle this problem end-to-end by training a detection transformer to directly output future objects. In order to make accurate predictions about the future, it is necessary to capture the dynamics in the scene, both of other objects and of the ego-camera. We extend existing detection transformers in two ways to capture the scene dynamics. First, we experiment with three different mechanisms that enable the model to spatiotemporally process multiple frames. Second, we feed ego-motion information to the model via cross-attention. We show that both of these cues substantially improve future object prediction performance. Our final approach learns to capture the dynamics and make predictions on par with an oracle for 100 ms prediction horizons, and outperform baselines for longer prediction horizons.  ( 2 min )

The great success of deep neural networks is built upon their over-parameterization, which smooths the optimization landscape without degrading the generalization ability. Despite the benefits of over-parameterization, a huge amount of parameters makes deep networks cumbersome in daily life applications. Though techniques such as pruning and distillation are developed, they are expensive in fully training a dense network as backward selection methods, and there is still a void on systematically exploring forward selection methods for learning structural sparsity in deep networks. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes a new approach based on differential inclusions of inverse scale spaces, which generate a family of models from simple to complex ones along the dynamics via coupling a pair of parameters, such that over-parameterized deep models and their structural sparsity can be explored simultaneously. This kind of differential inclusion scheme has a simple discretization, dubbed Deep structure splitting Linearized Bregman Iteration (DessiLBI), whose global convergence in learning deep networks could be established under the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz framework. Experimental evidence shows that our method achieves comparable and even better performance than the competitive optimizers in exploring the sparse structure of several widely used backbones on the benchmark datasets. Remarkably, with early stopping, our method unveils `winning tickets' in early epochs: the effective sparse network structures with comparable test accuracy to fully trained over-parameterized models, that are further transferable to similar alternative tasks. Furthermore, our method is able to grow networks efficiently with adaptive filter configurations, demonstrating a good performance with much less computational cost. Codes and models can be downloaded at {https://github.com/DessiLBI2020/DessiLBI}.  ( 3 min )

The majority of IoT devices like smartwatches, smart plugs, HVAC controllers, etc., are powered by hardware with a constrained specification (low memory, clock speed and processor) which is insufficient to accommodate and execute large, high-quality models. On such resource-constrained devices, manufacturers still manage to provide attractive functionalities (to boost sales) by following the traditional approach of programming IoT devices/products to collect and transmit data (image, audio, sensor readings, etc.) to their cloud-based ML analytics platforms. For decades, this online approach has been facing issues such as compromised data streams, non-real-time analytics due to latency, bandwidth constraints, costly subscriptions, recent privacy issues raised by users and the GDPR guidelines, etc. In this paper, to enable ultra-fast and accurate AI-based offline analytics on resource-constrained IoT devices, we present an end-to-end multi-component model optimization sequence and open-source its implementation. Researchers and developers can use our optimization sequence to optimize high memory, computation demanding models in multiple aspects in order to produce small size, low latency, low-power consuming models that can comfortably fit and execute on resource-constrained hardware. The experimental results show that our optimization components can produce models that are; (i) 12.06 x times compressed; (ii) 0.13% to 0.27% more accurate; (iii) Orders of magnitude faster unit inference at 0.06 ms. Our optimization sequence is generic and can be applied to any state-of-the-art models trained for anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, robotics, voice recognition, and machine vision.  ( 2 min )

Motivated by the growing importance of reducing unfairness in ML predictions, Fair-ML researchers have presented an extensive suite of algorithmic "fairness-enhancing" remedies. Most existing algorithms, however, are agnostic to the sources of the observed unfairness. As a result, the literature currently lacks guiding frameworks to specify conditions under which each algorithmic intervention can potentially alleviate the underpinning cause of unfairness. To close this gap, we scrutinize the underlying biases (e.g., in the training data or design choices) that cause observational unfairness. We present a bias-injection sandbox tool to investigate fairness consequences of various biases and assess the effectiveness of algorithmic remedies in the presence of specific types of bias. We call this process the bias(stress)-testing of algorithmic interventions. Unlike existing toolkits, ours provides a controlled environment to counterfactually inject biases in the ML pipeline. This stylized setup offers the distinct capability of testing fairness interventions beyond observational data and against an unbiased benchmark. In particular, we can test whether a given remedy can alleviate the injected bias by comparing the predictions resulting after the intervention in the biased setting with true labels in the unbiased regime -- that is, before any bias injection. We illustrate the utility of our toolkit via a proof-of-concept case study on synthetic data. Our empirical analysis showcases the type of insights that can be obtained through our simulations.  ( 2 min )

Anomaly detection is important for industrial automation and part quality assurance, and while humans can easily detect anomalies in components given a few examples, designing a generic automated system that can perform at human or above human capabilities remains a challenge. In this work, we present a simple new anomaly detection algorithm called FADS (feature-based anomaly detection system) which leverages pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNN) to generate a statistical model of nominal inputs by observing the activation of the convolutional filters. During inference the system compares the convolutional filter activation of the new input to the statistical model and flags activations that are outside the expected range of values and therefore likely an anomaly. By using a pretrained network, FADS demonstrates excellent performance similar to or better than other machine learning approaches to anomaly detection while at the same time FADS requires no tuning of the CNN weights. We demonstrate FADS ability by detecting process parameter changes on a custom dataset of additively manufactured lattices. The FADS localization algorithm shows that textural differences that are visible on the surface can be used to detect process parameter changes. In addition, we test FADS on benchmark datasets, such as the MVTec Anomaly Detection dataset, and report good results.  ( 2 min )

Predicting incoming failures and scheduling maintenance based on sensors information in industrial machines is increasingly important to avoid downtime and machine failure. Different machine learning formulations can be used to solve the predictive maintenance problem. However, many of the approaches studied in the literature are not directly applicable to real-life scenarios. Indeed, many of those approaches usually either rely on labelled machine malfunctions in the case of classification and fault detection, or rely on finding a monotonic health indicator on which a prediction can be made in the case of regression and remaining useful life estimation, which is not always feasible. Moreover, the decision-making part of the problem is not always studied in conjunction with the prediction phase. This paper aims to design and compare different formulations for predictive maintenance in a two-level framework and design metrics that quantify both the failure detection performance as well as the timing of the maintenance decision. The first level is responsible for building a health indicator by aggregating features using a learning algorithm. The second level consists of a decision-making system that can trigger an alarm based on this health indicator. Three degrees of refinements are compared in the first level of the framework, from simple threshold-based univariate predictive technique to supervised learning methods based on the remaining time before failure. We choose to use the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and its variations as the common algorithm used in all the formulations. We apply and compare the different strategies on a real-world rotating machine case study and observe that while a simple model can already perform well, more sophisticated refinements enhance the predictions for well-chosen parameters.  ( 2 min )

Urban traffic flow prediction using data-driven models can play an important role in route planning and preventing congestion on highways. These methods utilize data collected from traffic recording stations at different timestamps to predict the future status of traffic. Hence, data collection, transmission, storage, and extraction techniques can have a significant impact on the performance of the traffic flow model. On the other hand, a comprehensive database can provide the opportunity for using complex, yet reliable predictive models such as deep learning methods. However, most of these methods have difficulties in handling missing values and outliers. This study focuses on hybrid deep neural networks to predict traffic flow in the California Freeway Performance Measurement System (PeMS) with missing values. The proposed networks are based on a combination of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to consider the temporal dependencies in the data recorded in each station and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to take the spatial correlations in the adjacent stations into account. Various architecture configurations with series and parallel connections are considered based on RNNs and CNNs, and several prevalent data imputation techniques are used to examine the robustness of the hybrid networks to missing values. A comprehensive analysis performed on two different datasets from PeMS indicates that the proposed series-parallel hybrid network with the mean imputation technique achieves the lowest error in predicting the traffic flow and is robust to missing values up until 21% missing ratio in both complete and incomplete training data scenarios when applied to an incomplete test data.  ( 2 min )

Thin-cap fibroatheroma (TCFA) and plaque rupture have been recognized as the most frequent risk factor for thrombosis and acute coronary syndrome. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) can identify TCFA and assess cap thickness, which provides an opportunity to assess plaque vulnerability. We developed an automated method that can detect lipidous plaque and assess fibrous cap thickness in IVOCT images. This study analyzed a total of 4,360 IVOCT image frames of 77 lesions among 41 patients. To improve segmentation performance, preprocessing included lumen segmentation, pixel-shifting, and noise filtering on the raw polar (r, theta) IVOCT images. We used the DeepLab-v3 plus deep learning model to classify lipidous plaque pixels. After lipid detection, we automatically detected the outer border of the fibrous cap using a special dynamic programming algorithm and assessed the cap thickness. Our method provided excellent discriminability of lipid plaque with a sensitivity of 85.8% and A-line Dice coefficient of 0.837. By comparing lipid angle measurements between two analysts following editing of our automated software, we found good agreement by Bland-Altman analysis (difference 6.7+/-17 degree; mean 196 degree). Our method accurately detected the fibrous cap from the detected lipid plaque. Automated analysis required a significant modification for only 5.5% frames. Furthermore, our method showed a good agreement of fibrous cap thickness between two analysts with Bland-Altman analysis (4.2+/-14.6 micron; mean 175 micron), indicating little bias between users and good reproducibility of the measurement. We developed a fully automated method for fibrous cap quantification in IVOCT images, resulting in good agreement with determinations by analysts. The method has great potential to enable highly automated, repeatable, and comprehensive evaluations of TCFAs.  ( 2 min )

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been conducting a second iteration of the CTS challenge since August 2020. The current iteration of the CTS Challenge is a leaderboard-style speaker recognition evaluation using telephony data extracted from the unexposed portions of the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) and Multi-Language Speech (MLS) corpora collected by the LDC. The CTS Challenge is currently organized in a similar manner to the SRE19 CTS Challenge, offering only an open training condition using two evaluation subsets, namely Progress and Test. Unlike in the SRE19 Challenge, no training or development set was initially released, and NIST has publicly released the leaderboards on both subsets for the CTS Challenge. Which subset (i.e., Progress or Test) a trial belongs to is unknown to challenge participants, and each system submission needs to contain outputs for all of the trials. The CTS Challenge has also served, and will continue to do so, as a prerequisite for entrance to the regular SREs (such as SRE21). Since August 2020, a total of 53 organizations (forming 33 teams) from academia and industry have participated in the CTS Challenge and submitted more than 4400 valid system outputs. This paper presents an overview of the evaluation and several analyses of system performance for some primary conditions in the CTS Challenge. The CTS Challenge results thus far indicate remarkable improvements in performance due to 1) speaker embeddings extracted using large-scale and complex neural network architectures such as ResNets along with angular margin losses for speaker embedding extraction, 2) extensive data augmentation, 3) the use of large amounts of in-house proprietary data from a large number of labeled speakers, 4) long-duration fine-tuning.  ( 2 min )

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO algorithms as compared to DDPG and MPO, respectively [Barth-Maron et al., 2018; Hoffman et al., 2020]. However, both agents rely on the C51 critic for value estimation.One major drawback of the C51 approach is its requirement of prior knowledge about the minimum andmaximum values a policy can attain as well as the number of bins used, which fixes the resolution ofthe distributional estimate. While the DeepMind control suite of tasks utilizes standardized rewards and episode lengths, thus enabling the entire suite to be solved with a single setting of these hyperparameters, this is often not the case. This paper revisits a natural alternative that removes this requirement, namelya mixture of Gaussians, and a simple sample-based loss function to train it in an off-policy regime. We empirically evaluate its performance on a broad range of continuous control tasks and demonstrate that it eliminates the need for these distributional hyperparameters and achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of challenging tasks (e.g. the humanoid, dog, quadruped, and manipulator domains). Finallywe provide an implementation in the Acme agent repository.  ( 2 min )

In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on offensive content. The amount of offensive content generated by social media is increasing at an alarming rate. This created a greater need to address this issue than ever before. To address these issues, the organizers of "Dravidian-Code Mixed HASOC-2020" have created two challenges. Task 1 involves identifying offensive content in Malayalam data, whereas Task 2 includes Malayalam and Tamil Code Mixed Sentences. Our team participated in Task 2. In our suggested model, we experiment with multilingual BERT to extract features, and three different classifiers are used on extracted features. Our model received a weighted F1 score of 0.70 for Malayalam data and was ranked fifth; we also received a weighted F1 score of 0.573 for Tamil Code Mixed data and were ranked eleventh.  ( 2 min )

Extracting phenotypes from clinical text has been shown to be useful for a variety of clinical use cases such as identifying patients with rare diseases. However, reasoning with numerical values remains challenging for phenotyping in clinical text, for example, temperature 102F representing Fever. Current state-of-the-art phenotyping models are able to detect general phenotypes, but perform poorly when they detect phenotypes requiring numerical reasoning. We present a novel unsupervised methodology leveraging external knowledge and contextualized word embeddings from ClinicalBERT for numerical reasoning in a variety of phenotypic contexts. Comparing against unsupervised benchmarks, it shows a substantial performance improvement with absolute gains on generalized Recall and F1 scores up to 79% and 71%, respectively. In the supervised setting, it also surpasses the performance of alternative approaches with absolute gains on generalized Recall and F1 scores up to 70% and 44%, respectively.  ( 2 min )

The growing use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety- and security-critical areas like autonomous driving raises the need for their systematic testing. Coverage-guided testing (CGT) is an approach that applies mutation or fuzzing according to a predefined coverage metric to find inputs that cause misbehavior. With the introduction of a neuron coverage metric, CGT has also recently been applied to DNNs. In this work, we apply CGT to the task of person detection in crowded scenes. The proposed pipeline uses YOLOv3 for person detection and includes finding DNN bugs via sampling and mutation, and subsequent DNN retraining on the updated training set. To be a bug, we require a mutated image to cause a significant performance drop compared to a clean input. In accordance with the CGT, we also consider an additional requirement of increased coverage in the bug definition. In order to explore several types of robustness, our approach includes natural image transformations, corruptions, and adversarial examples generated with the Daedalus attack. The proposed framework has uncovered several thousand cases of incorrect DNN behavior. The relative change in mAP performance of the retrained models reached on average between 26.21\% and 64.24\% for different robustness types. However, we have found no evidence that the investigated coverage metrics can be advantageously used to improve robustness.  ( 2 min )

Here I present an investigation on the evolution and use of vocabulary in data science in the last 13 years. Based on a rigorous statistical analysis, a database with 12,787 documents containing the words "data science" in the title, abstract or keywords is analyzed. It is proposed to classify the evolution of this discipline in three periods: emergence, growth and boom. Characteristic words and pioneering documents are identified for each period. By proposing the distinctive vocabulary and relevant topics of data science and classified in time periods, these results add value to the scientific community of this discipline.  ( 2 min )

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in many real applications, and recent studies have revealed their vulnerabilities against topology attacks. To address this issue, existing efforts have mainly been dedicated to improving the robustness of GNNs, while little attention has been paid to the detection of such attacks. In this work, we study the victim node detection problem under topology attacks against GNNs. Our approach is built upon the key observation rooted in the intrinsic message passing nature of GNNs. That is, the neighborhood of a victim node tends to have two competing group forces, pushing the node classification results towards the original label and the targeted label, respectively. Based on this observation, we propose to detect victim nodes by deliberately designing an effective measurement of the neighborhood variance for each node. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets and five existing topology attacks show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed detection approach.  ( 2 min )

Video decomposition is very important to extract moving foreground objects from complex backgrounds in computer vision, machine learning, and medical imaging, e.g., extracting moving contrast-filled vessels from the complex and noisy backgrounds of X-ray coronary angiography (XCA). However, the challenges caused by dynamic backgrounds, overlapping heterogeneous environments and complex noises still exist in video decomposition. To solve these problems, this study is the first to introduce a flexible visual working memory model in video decomposition tasks to provide interpretable and high-performance hierarchical deep architecture, integrating the transformative representations between sensory and control layers from the perspective of visual and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, robust PCA unrolling networks acting as a structure-regularized sensor layer decompose XCA into sparse/low-rank structured representations to separate moving contrast-filled vessels from noisy and complex backgrounds. Then, patch recurrent convolutional LSTM networks with a backprojection module embody unstructured random representations of the control layer in working memory, recurrently projecting spatiotemporally decomposed nonlocal patches into orthogonal subspaces for heterogeneous vessel retrieval and interference suppression. This video decomposition deep architecture effectively restores the heterogeneous profiles of intensity and the geometries of moving objects against the complex background interferences. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accurate moving contrast-filled vessel extraction with excellent flexibility and computational efficiency.  ( 2 min )

Correctly quantifying the robustness of machine learning models is a central aspect in judging their suitability for specific tasks, and thus, ultimately, for generating trust in the models. We show that the widely used concept of adversarial robustness and closely related metrics based on counterfactuals are not necessarily valid metrics for determining the robustness of ML models against perturbations that occur "naturally", outside specific adversarial attack scenarios. Additionally, we argue that generic robustness metrics in principle are insufficient for determining real-world-robustness. Instead we propose a flexible approach that models possible perturbations in input data individually for each application. This is then combined with a probabilistic approach that computes the likelihood that a real-world perturbation will change a prediction, thus giving quantitative information of the robustness of the trained machine learning model. The method does not require access to the internals of the classifier and thus in principle works for any black-box model. It is, however, based on Monte-Carlo sampling and thus only suited for input spaces with small dimensions. We illustrate our approach on two dataset, as well as on analytically solvable cases. Finally, we discuss ideas on how real-world robustness could be computed or estimated in high-dimensional input spaces.  ( 2 min )

Outlier detection is an important topic in machine learning and has been used in a wide range of applications. Outliers are objects that are few in number and deviate from the majority of objects. As a result of these two properties, we show that outliers are susceptible to a mechanism called fluctuation. This article proposes a method called fluctuation-based outlier detection (FBOD) that achieves a low linear time complexity and detects outliers purely based on the concept of fluctuation without employing any distance, density or isolation measure. Fundamentally different from all existing methods. FBOD first converts the Euclidean structure datasets into graphs by using random links, then propagates the feature value according to the connection of the graph. Finally, by comparing the difference between the fluctuation of an object and its neighbors, FBOD determines the object with a larger difference as an outlier. The results of experiments comparing FBOD with seven state-of-the-art algorithms on eight real-world tabular datasets and three video datasets show that FBOD outperforms its competitors in the majority of cases and that FBOD has only 5% of the execution time of the fastest algorithm. The experiment codes are available at: https://github.com/FluctuationOD/Fluctuation-based-Outlier-Detection.  ( 2 min )

An end-to-end platform assembling multiple tiers is built for precisely cognizing brain activities. Being fed massive electroencephalogram (EEG) data, the time-frequency spectrograms are conventionally projected into the episode-wise feature matrices (seen as tier-1). A spiking neural network (SNN) based tier is designed to distill the principle information in terms of spike-streams from the rare features, which maintains the temporal implication in the nature of EEGs. The proposed tier-3 transposes time- and space-domain of spike patterns from the SNN; and feeds the transposed pattern-matrices into an artificial neural network (ANN, Transformer specifically) known as tier-4, where a special spanning topology is proposed to match the two-dimensional input form. In this manner, cognition such as classification is conducted with high accuracy. For proof-of-concept, the sleep stage scoring problem is demonstrated by introducing multiple EEG datasets with the largest comprising 42,560 hours recorded from 5,793 subjects. From experiment results, our platform achieves the general cognition overall accuracy of 87% by leveraging sole EEG, which is 2% superior to the state-of-the-art. Moreover, our developed multi-tier methodology offers visible and graphical interpretations of the temporal characteristics of EEG by identifying the critical episodes, which is demanded in neurodynamics but hardly appears in conventional cognition scenarios.  ( 2 min )

In the process of collecting data from sensors, several circumstances can affect their continuity and validity, resulting in alterations of the data or loss of information. Although classical methods of statistics, such as interpolation-like techniques, can be used to approximate the missing data in a time series, the recent developments in Deep Learning (DL) have given impetus to innovative and much more accurate forecasting techniques. In the present paper, we develop two DL models aimed at filling data gaps, for the specific case of internal temperature time series obtained from monitored apartments located in Bolzano, Italy. The DL models developed in the present work are based on the combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (LSTMs), and Bidirectional LSTMs (BiLSTMs). Two key features of our models are the use of both pre- and post-gap data, and the exploitation of a correlated time series (the external temperature) in order to predict the target one (the internal temperature). Our approach manages to capture the fluctuating nature of the data and shows good accuracy in reconstructing the target time series. In addition, our models significantly improve the already good results from another DL architecture that is used as a baseline for the present work.  ( 2 min )

Indexing is an effective way to support efficient query processing in large databases. Recently the concept of learned index has been explored actively to replace or supplement traditional index structures with machine learning models to reduce storage and search costs. However, accurate and efficient similarity query processing in high-dimensional metric spaces remains to be an open challenge. In this paper, a novel indexing approach called LIMS is proposed to use data clustering and pivot-based data transformation techniques to build learned indexes for efficient similarity query processing in metric spaces. The underlying data is partitioned into clusters such that each cluster follows a relatively uniform data distribution. Data redistribution is achieved by utilizing a small number of pivots for each cluster. Similar data are mapped into compact regions and the mapped values are totally ordinal. Machine learning models are developed to approximate the position of each data record on the disk. Efficient algorithms are designed for processing range queries and nearest neighbor queries based on LIMS, and for index maintenance with dynamic updates. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of LIMS compared with traditional indexes and state-of-the-art learned indexes.  ( 2 min )

Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful but computationally expensive machine learning models, requiring an estimate of the kernel covariance matrix for every prediction. In large and complex domains, such as graphs, sets, or images, the choice of suitable kernel can also be non-trivial to determine, providing an additional obstacle to the learning task. Over the last decade, these challenges have resulted in significant advances being made in terms of scalability and expressivity, exemplified by, e.g., the use of inducing points and neural network kernel approximations. In this paper, we propose inducing Gaussian process networks (IGN), a simple framework for simultaneously learning the feature space as well as the inducing points. The inducing points, in particular, are learned directly in the feature space, enabling a seamless representation of complex structured domains while also facilitating scalable gradient-based learning methods. We consider both regression and (binary) classification tasks and report on experimental results for real-world data sets showing that IGNs provide significant advances over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate how IGNs can be used to effectively model complex domains using neural network architectures.  ( 2 min )

Traditional machine learning algorithms are designed to learn in isolation, i.e. address single tasks. The core idea of transfer learning (TL) is that knowledge gained in learning to perform one task (source) can be leveraged to improve learning performance in a related, but different, task (target). TL leverages and transfers previously acquired knowledge to address the expense of data acquisition and labeling, potential computational power limitations, and the dataset distribution mismatches. Although significant progress has been made in the fields of image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing (for classification and regression) for TL, little work has been done in the field of scientific machine learning for functional regression and uncertainty quantification in partial differential equations. In this work, we propose a novel TL framework for task-specific learning under conditional shift with a deep operator network (DeepONet). Inspired by the conditional embedding operator theory, we measure the statistical distance between the source domain and the target feature domain by embedding conditional distributions onto a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Task-specific operator learning is accomplished by fine-tuning task-specific layers of the target DeepONet using a hybrid loss function that allows for the matching of individual target samples while also preserving the global properties of the conditional distribution of target data. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach for various TL scenarios involving nonlinear PDEs under conditional shift. Our results include geometry domain adaptation and show that the proposed TL framework enables fast and efficient multi-task operator learning, despite significant differences between the source and target domains.  ( 2 min )

Graph mining algorithms have been playing a significant role in myriad fields over the years. However, despite their promising performance on various graph analytical tasks, most of these algorithms lack fairness considerations. As a consequence, they could lead to discrimination towards certain populations when exploited in human-centered applications. Recently, algorithmic fairness has been extensively studied in graph-based applications. In contrast to algorithmic fairness on independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, fairness in graph mining has exclusive backgrounds, taxonomies, and fulfilling techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction of existing literature under the context of fair graph mining. Specifically, we propose a novel taxonomy of fairness notions on graphs, which sheds light on their connections and differences. We further present an organized summary of existing techniques that promote fairness in graph mining. Finally, we summarize the widely used datasets in this emerging research field and provide insights on current research challenges and open questions, aiming at encouraging cross-breeding ideas and further advances.  ( 2 min )

Scientists frequently prioritize learning from data rather than training the best possible model; however, research in machine learning often prioritizes the latter. The development of marginal feature importance methods, such as marginal contribution feature importance, attempts to break this trend by providing a useful framework for explaining relationships in data in an interpretable fashion. In this work, we generalize the framework of marginal contribution feature importance to improve performance with regards to detecting correlated interactions and reducing runtime. To do so, we consider "information subsets" of the set of features $F$ and show that our importance metric can be computed directly after applying fair representation learning methods from the AI fairness literature. The methods of optimal transport and linear regression are considered and explored experimentally for removing all the information of our feature of interest $f$ from the feature set $F$. Given these implementations, we show on real and simulated data that ultra marginal feature importance performs at least as well as marginal contribution feature importance, with substantially faster computation time and better performance in the presence of correlated interactions and unrelated features.  ( 2 min )

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems power the world we live in. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are able to solve tasks in an ever-expanding landscape of scenarios, but our eagerness to apply these powerful models leads us to focus on their performance and deprioritises our ability to understand them. Current research in the field of explainable AI tries to bridge this gap by developing various perturbation or gradient-based explanation techniques. For images, these techniques fail to fully capture and convey the semantic information needed to elucidate why the model makes the predictions it does. In this work, we develop a new form of explanation that is radically different in nature from current explanation methods, such as Grad-CAM. Perception visualization provides a visual representation of what the DNN perceives in the input image by depicting what visual patterns the latent representation corresponds to. Visualizations are obtained through a reconstruction model that inverts the encoded features, such that the parameters and predictions of the original models are not modified. Results of our user study demonstrate that humans can better understand and predict the system's decisions when perception visualizations are available, thus easing the debugging and deployment of deep models as trusted systems.  ( 2 min )

Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations, which becomes a severe threat and largely limits their applications in security-critical scenarios. To mitigate such a threat, considerable research efforts have been devoted to increasing the robustness of GCNs against adversarial attacks. However, current approaches for defense are typically designed for the whole graph and consider the global performance, posing challenges in protecting important local nodes from stronger adversarial targeted attacks. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method, named \textbf{\underline{G}}raph \textbf{\underline{U}}niversal \textbf{\underline{A}}dve\textbf{\underline{R}}sarial \textbf{\underline{D}}efense (GUARD). Unlike previous works, GUARD protects each individual node from attacks with a universal defensive patch, which is generated once and can be applied to any node (node-agnostic) in a graph. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves robustness for several established GCNs against multiple adversarial attacks and outperforms existing adversarial defense methods by large margins. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/EdisonLeeeee/GUARD.  ( 2 min )

In healthcare prediction tasks, it is essential to exploit the correlations between medical features and learn better patient health representations. Existing methods try to estimate feature correlations only from data, or increase the quality of estimation by introducing task-specific medical knowledge. However, such methods either are difficult to estimate the feature correlations due to insufficient training samples, or cannot be generalized to other tasks due to reliance on specific knowledge. There are medical research revealing that not all the medical features are strongly correlated. Thus, to address the issues, we expect to group up strongly correlated features and learn feature correlations in a group-wise manner to reduce the learning complexity without losing generality. In this paper, we propose a general patient health representation learning framework MedFACT. We estimate correlations via measuring similarity between temporal patterns of medical features with kernel methods, and cluster features with strong correlations into groups. The feature group is further formulated as a correlation graph, and we employ graph convolutional networks to conduct group-wise feature interactions for better representation learning. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MedFACT. The discovered medical findings are also confirmed by literature, providing valuable medical insights and explanations.  ( 2 min )

Extracting actionable information from data sources such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS-II) and Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) is becoming more challenging due to the fast-growing data generation rate. The rapid analysis possible with ML methods can enable fast feedback loops that can be used to adjust experimental setups in real-time, for example when errors occur or interesting events are detected. However, to avoid degradation in ML performance over time due to changes in an instrument or sample, we need a way to update ML models rapidly while an experiment is running. We present here a data service and model service to accelerate deep neural network training with a focus on ML-based scientific applications. Our proposed data service achieves 100x speedup in terms of data labeling compare to the current state-of-the-art. Further, our model service achieves up to 200x improvement in training speed. Overall, fairDMS achieves up to 92x speedup in terms of end-to-end model updating time.  ( 2 min )

Despite the success of reinforcement learning (RL) for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with function approximation, most RL algorithms easily fail if the agent only has partial observations of the state. Such a setting is often modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Existing sample-efficient algorithms for POMDPs are restricted to the tabular setting where the state and observation spaces are finite. In this paper, we make the first attempt at tackling the tension between function approximation and partial observability. In specific, we focus on a class of undercomplete POMDPs with linear function approximations, which allows the state and observation spaces to be infinite. For such POMDPs, we show that the optimal policy and value function can be characterized by a sequence of finite-memory Bellman operators. We propose an RL algorithm that constructs optimistic estimators of these operators via reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the proposed algorithm finds an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with $\tilde O (1/\varepsilon^2)$ episodes of exploration. Also, this sample complexity only depends on the intrinsic dimension of the POMDP polynomially and is independent of the size of the state and observation spaces. To our best knowledge, we develop the first provably sample-efficient algorithm for POMDPs with function approximation.  ( 2 min )

Most studies in cross-device federated learning focus on small models, due to the server-client communication and on-device computation bottlenecks. In this work, we leverage various techniques for mitigating these bottlenecks to train larger language models in cross-device federated learning. With systematic applications of partial model training, quantization, efficient transfer learning, and communication-efficient optimizers, we are able to train a $21$M parameter Transformer that achieves the same perplexity as that of a similarly sized LSTM with $\sim10\times$ smaller client-to-server communication cost and $11\%$ lower perplexity than smaller LSTMs commonly studied in literature.  ( 2 min )

A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals. Symbolic reward machines augment existing reward machine formalism by allowing transitions to carry predicates and symbolic reward outputs. This formalism lends itself well to inverse reinforcement learning, whereby the key challenge is determining appropriate assignments to the symbolic values from a few expert demonstrations. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian approach for inferring the most likely assignments such that the concretized reward machine can discriminate expert demonstrated trajectories from other trajectories with high accuracy. Experimental results show that learned reward machines can significantly improve training efficiency for complex RL tasks and generalize well across different task environment configurations.  ( 2 min )

The limited communication resources, e.g., bandwidth and energy, and data heterogeneity across devices are two of the main bottlenecks for federated learning (FL). To tackle these challenges, we first devise a novel FL framework with partial model aggregation (PMA), which only aggregates the lower layers of neural networks responsible for feature extraction while the upper layers corresponding to complex pattern recognition remain at devices for personalization. The proposed PMA-FL is able to address the data heterogeneity and reduce the transmitted information in wireless channels. We then obtain a convergence bound of the framework under a non-convex loss function setting. With the aid of this bound, we define a new objective function, named the scheduled data sample volume, to transfer the original inexplicit optimization problem into a tractable one for device scheduling, bandwidth allocation, computation and communication time division. Our analysis reveals that the optimal time division is achieved when the communication and computation parts of PMA-FL have the same power. We also develop a bisection method to solve the optimal bandwidth allocation policy and use the set expansion algorithm to address the optimal device scheduling. Compared with the state-of-the-art benchmarks, the proposed PMA-FL improves 2.72% and 11.6% accuracy on two typical heterogeneous datasets, i.e., MINIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. In addition, the proposed joint dynamic device scheduling and resource optimization approach achieve slightly higher accuracy than the considered benchmarks, but they provide a satisfactory energy and time reduction: 29% energy or 20% time reduction on the MNIST; and 25% energy or 12.5% time reduction on the CIFAR-10.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we consider the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and derive exact closed-form formulas for the finite-time mean-squared estimation errors of decentralized temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. Our analysis hinges upon the fact that the decentralized TD learning method can be viewed as a Markov jump linear system (MJLS). Then standard MJLS theory can be applied to quantify the mean and covariance matrix of the estimation error of the decentralized TD method at every time step. Various implications of our exact formulas on the algorithm performance are also discussed. An interesting finding is that under a necessary and sufficient stability condition, the mean-squared TD estimation error will converge to an exact limit at a specific exponential rate.  ( 2 min )

Businesses need content. In various forms and formats and for varied purposes. In fact, the content marketing industry is set to be worth $412.88 billion by the end of 2021. However, according to the Content Marketing Institute, creating engaging content is the #1 challenge that marketers face today. We under-stand that producing great content requires great writers who understand the business and can weave their message into reader (and search engine) friendly content. In this project, the team has attempted to bridge the gap between writers and projects by using AI and ML tools. We used NLP techniques to analyze thou-sands of publicly available business articles (corpora) to extract various defining factors for each writing sample. Through this project we aim to automate the highly time-consuming, and often biased task of manually shortlisting the most suitable writer for a given content writing requirement. We believe that a tool like this will have far reaching positive implications for both parties - businesses looking for suitable talent for niche writing jobs as well as experienced writers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) wanting to lend their services to content marketing projects. The business gets the content they need, the content writer/ SME gets a chance to leverage his or her talent, while the reader gets authentic content that adds real value.  ( 2 min )

Biological systems in nature have evolved for millions of years to adapt and survive the environment. Many features they developed can be inspirational and beneficial for solving technical problems in modern industries. This leads to a novel form of design-by-analogy called bio-inspired design (BID). Although BID as a design method has been proven beneficial, the gap between biology and engineering continuously hinders designers from effectively applying the method. Therefore, we explore the recent advance of artificial intelligence (AI) for a computational approach to bridge the gap. This paper proposes a generative design approach based on the pre-trained language model (PLM) to automatically retrieve and map biological analogy and generate BID in the form of natural language. The latest generative pre-trained transformer, namely GPT-3, is used as the base PLM. Three types of design concept generators are identified and fine-tuned from the PLM according to the looseness of the problem space representation. Machine evaluators are also fine-tuned to assess the correlation between the domains within the generated BID concepts. The approach is then tested via a case study in which the fine-tuned models are applied to generate and evaluate light-weighted flying car concepts inspired by nature. The results show our approach can generate BID concepts with good performance.  ( 2 min )

This paper tackles the problem of decomposing binary data using matrix factorization. We consider the family of mean-parametrized Bernoulli models, a class of generative models that are well suited for modeling binary data and enables interpretability of the factors. We factorize the Bernoulli parameter and consider an additional Beta prior on one of the factors to further improve the model's expressive power. While similar models have been proposed in the literature, they only exploit the Beta prior as a proxy to ensure a valid Bernoulli parameter in a Bayesian setting; in practice it reduces to a uniform or uninformative prior. Besides, estimation in these models has focused on costly Bayesian inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet very efficient majorization-minimization algorithm for maximum a posteriori estimation. Our approach leverages the Beta prior whose parameters can be tuned to improve performance in matrix completion tasks. Experiments conducted on three public binary datasets show that our approach offers an excellent trade-off between prediction performance, computational complexity, and interpretability.  ( 2 min )

Super-resolution suffers from an innate ill-posed problem that a single low-resolution (LR) image can be from multiple high-resolution (HR) images. Recent studies on the flow-based algorithm solve this ill-posedness by learning the super-resolution space and predicting diverse HR outputs. Unfortunately, the diversity of the super-resolution outputs is still unsatisfactory, and the outputs from the flow-based model usually suffer from undesired artifacts which causes low-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose FS-NCSR which produces diverse and high-quality super-resolution outputs using frequency separation and noise conditioning compared to the existing flow-based approaches. As the sharpness and high-quality detail of the image rely on its high-frequency information, FS-NCSR only estimates the high-frequency information of the high-resolution outputs without redundant low-frequency components. Through this, FS-NCSR significantly improves the diversity score without significant image quality degradation compared to the NCSR, the winner of the previous NTIRE 2021 challenge.  ( 2 min )

We study the theory of neural network (NN) from the lens of classical nonparametric regression problems with a focus on NN's ability to adaptively estimate functions with heterogeneous smoothness -- a property of functions in Besov or Bounded Variation (BV) classes. Existing work on this problem requires tuning the NN architecture based on the function spaces and sample sizes. We consider a "Parallel NN" variant of deep ReLU networks and show that the standard weight decay is equivalent to promoting the $\ell_p$-sparsity ($0<p<1$) of the coefficient vector of an end-to-end learned function bases, i.e., a dictionary. Using this equivalence, we further establish that by tuning only the weight decay, such Parallel NN achieves an estimation error arbitrarily close to the minimax rates for both the Besov and BV classes. Notably, it gets exponentially closer to minimax optimal as the NN gets deeper. Our research sheds new lights on why depth matters and how NNs are more powerful than kernel methods.  ( 2 min )

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how healthcare is delivered to patients, how patients interact with healthcare providers, and how healthcare information is disseminated to both healthcare providers and patients. Analytical models that were trained and tested pre-pandemic may no longer be performing up to expectations, providing unreliable and irrelevant learning (ML) models given that ML depends on the basic principle that what happened in the past are likely to repeat in the future. ML faced to two important degradation principles, concept drift, when the underlying properties and characteristics of the variables change and data drift, when the data distributions, probabilities, co-variates, and other variable relationships change, both of which are prime culprits of model failure. Therefore, detecting and diagnosing drift in existing models is something that has become an imperative. And perhaps even more important is a shift in our mindset towards a conscious recognition that drift is inevitable, and model building must incorporate intentional resilience, the ability to offset and recover quickly from failure, and proactive robustness, avoiding failure by developing models that are less vulnerable to drift and disruption.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we develop a novel approach to posterior contractions rates (PCRs), for both finite-dimensional (parametric) and infinite-dimensional (nonparametric) Bayesian models. Critical to our approach is the combination of an assumption of local Lipschitz-continuity for the posterior distribution with a dynamic formulation of the Wasserstein distance, here referred to as Wasserstein dynamics, which allows to set forth a connection between the problem of establishing PCRs and some classical problems in mathematical analysis, probability theory and mathematical statistics: the Laplace method for approximating integrals, Sanov's large deviation principles in the Wasserstein distance, rates of convergence of the mean Glivenko-Cantelli theorem, and estimates of weighted Poincar\'e-Wirtinger constants. Under dominated Bayesian models, we present two main results: i) a theorem on PCRs for the regular infinite-dimensional exponential family of statistical models; ii) a theorem on PCRs for a general dominated statistical model. Some applications of our results are presented for the regular parametric model, the multinomial model, the finite-dimensional and the infinite-dimensional logistic-Gaussian model and the infinite-dimensional linear regression. In general, our results lead to optimal PCRs in finite dimension, whereas in infinite dimension it is shown how the prior distribution may affect PCRs. With regards to infinite-dimensional Bayesian models for density estimation, our approach to PCRs is the first to consider strong norm distances on parameter spaces of functions, such as Sobolev-like norms, as most of the approaches in the classical (frequentist) and Bayesian literature deal with spaces of density functions endowed with $\mathrm{L}^p$ norms or the Hellinger distance.  ( 2 min )

We study offline recommender learning from explicit rating feedback in the presence of selection bias. A current promising solution for the bias is the inverse propensity score (IPS) estimation. However, the performance of existing propensity-based methods can suffer significantly from the propensity estimation bias. In fact, most of the previous IPS-based methods require some amount of missing-completely-at-random (MCAR) data to accurately estimate the propensity. This leads to a critical self-contradiction; IPS is ineffective without MCAR data, even though it originally aims to learn recommenders from only missing-not-at-random feedback. To resolve this propensity contradiction, we derive a propensity-independent generalization error bound and propose a novel algorithm to minimize the theoretical bound via adversarial learning. Our theory and algorithm do not require a propensity estimation procedure, thereby leading to a well-performing rating predictor without the true propensity information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to a range of existing methods both in rating prediction and ranking metrics in practical settings without MCAR data.  ( 2 min )

We provide a general framework for constructing probability distributions on Riemannian manifolds, taking advantage of area-preserving maps and isometries. Control over distributions' properties, such as parameters, symmetry and modality yield a family of flexible distributions that are straightforward to sample from, suitable for use within Monte Carlo algorithms and latent variable models, such as autoencoders. As an illustration, we empirically validate our approach by utilizing our proposed distributions within a variational autoencoder and a latent space network model. Finally, we take advantage of the generalized description of this framework to posit questions for future work.  ( 2 min )

Despite the success of reinforcement learning (RL) for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with function approximation, most RL algorithms easily fail if the agent only has partial observations of the state. Such a setting is often modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Existing sample-efficient algorithms for POMDPs are restricted to the tabular setting where the state and observation spaces are finite. In this paper, we make the first attempt at tackling the tension between function approximation and partial observability. In specific, we focus on a class of undercomplete POMDPs with linear function approximations, which allows the state and observation spaces to be infinite. For such POMDPs, we show that the optimal policy and value function can be characterized by a sequence of finite-memory Bellman operators. We propose an RL algorithm that constructs optimistic estimators of these operators via reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the proposed algorithm finds an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with $\tilde O (1/\varepsilon^2)$ episodes of exploration. Also, this sample complexity only depends on the intrinsic dimension of the POMDP polynomially and is independent of the size of the state and observation spaces. To our best knowledge, we develop the first provably sample-efficient algorithm for POMDPs with function approximation.

Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss functions are usually non-smooth. More recently, computationally fast non-convex approaches via sub-gradient descent are proposed, which, unfortunately, fail to deliver a statistically consistent estimator even under sub-Gaussian noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel Riemannian sub-gradient (RsGrad) algorithm which is not only computationally efficient with linear convergence but also is statistically optimal, be the noise Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Convergence theory is established for a general framework and specific applications to absolute loss, Huber loss, and quantile loss are investigated. Compared with existing non-convex methods, ours reveals a surprising phenomenon of dual-phase convergence. In phase one, RsGrad behaves as in a typical non-smooth optimization that requires gradually decaying stepsizes. However, phase one only delivers a statistically sub-optimal estimator which is already observed in the existing literature. Interestingly, during phase two, RsGrad converges linearly as if minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function and thus a constant stepsize suffices. Underlying the phase-two convergence is the smoothing effect of random noise to the non-smooth robust losses in an area close but not too close to the truth. Lastly, RsGrad is applicable for low-rank tensor estimation under heavy-tailed noise where a statistically optimal rate is attainable with the same phenomenon of dual-phase convergence, and a novel shrinkage-based second-order moment method is guaranteed to deliver a warm initialization. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical discovery and showcase the superiority of RsGrad over prior methods.

Pretrained language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance when adapted to a downstream NLP task. However, theoretical analysis of these models is scarce and challenging since the pretraining and downstream tasks can be very different. We propose an analysis framework that links the pretraining and downstream tasks with an underlying latent variable generative model of text -- the downstream classifier must recover a function of the posterior distribution over the latent variables. We analyze head tuning (learning a classifier on top of the frozen pretrained model) and prompt tuning in this setting. The generative model in our analysis is either a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) or an HMM augmented with a latent memory component, motivated by long-term dependencies in natural language. We show that 1) under certain non-degeneracy conditions on the HMM, simple classification heads can solve the downstream task, 2) prompt tuning obtains downstream guarantees with weaker non-degeneracy conditions, and 3) our recovery guarantees for the memory-augmented HMM are stronger than for the vanilla HMM because task-relevant information is easier to recover from the long-term memory. Experiments on synthetically generated data from HMMs back our theoretical findings.

In this work we explore a new framework for approximate Bayesian inference in large datasets based on stochastic control (i.e. Schr\"odinger bridges). We advocate stochastic control as a finite time and low variance alternative to popular steady-state methods such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD). Furthermore, we discuss and adapt the existing theoretical guarantees of this framework and establish connections to already existing VI routines in SDE-based models.

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are a common type of Graph Neural Network (GNN), in which each node's representation is computed recursively by aggregating representations (messages) from its immediate neighbors akin to a star-shaped pattern. MPNNs are appealing for being efficient and scalable, how-ever their expressiveness is upper-bounded by the 1st-order Weisfeiler-Lehman isomorphism test (1-WL). In response, prior works propose highly expressive models at the cost of scalability and sometimes generalization performance. Our work stands between these two regimes: we introduce a general framework to uplift any MPNN to be more expressive, with limited scalability overhead and greatly improved practical performance. We achieve this by extending local aggregation in MPNNs from star patterns to general subgraph patterns (e.g.,k-egonets):in our framework, each node representation is computed as the encoding of a surrounding induced subgraph rather than encoding of immediate neighbors only (i.e. a star). We choose the subgraph encoder to be a GNN (mainly MPNNs, considering scalability) to design a general framework that serves as a wrapper to up-lift any GNN. We call our proposed method GNN-AK(GNN As Kernel), as the framework resembles a convolutional neural network by replacing the kernel with GNNs. Theoretically, we show that our framework is strictly more powerful than 1&2-WL, and is not less powerful than 3-WL. We also design subgraph sampling strategies which greatly reduce memory footprint and improve speed while maintaining performance. Our method sets new state-of-the-art performance by large margins for several well-known graph ML tasks; specifically, 0.08 MAE on ZINC,74.79% and 86.887% accuracy on CIFAR10 and PATTERN respectively.

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large number of trials to learn a good policy, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We explore a method to improve the sample efficiency when we have access to demonstrations. Our approach, Backplay, uses a single demonstration to construct a curriculum for a given task. Rather than starting each training episode in the environment's fixed initial state, we start the agent near the end of the demonstration and move the starting point backwards during the course of training until we reach the initial state. Our contributions are that we analytically characterize the types of environments where Backplay can improve training speed, demonstrate the effectiveness of Backplay both in large grid worlds and a complex four player zero-sum game (Pommerman), and show that Backplay compares favorably to other competitive methods known to improve sample efficiency. This includes reward shaping, behavioral cloning, and reverse curriculum generation.

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We propose a novel Transformer architecture consisting of a new conditional attention mechanism as well as a set of task-conditioned modules that facilitate weight sharing. Through this construction (a hypernetwork adapter), we achieve more efficient parameter sharing and mitigate forgetting by keeping half of the weights of a pretrained model fixed. We also use a new multi-task data sampling strategy to mitigate the negative effects of data imbalance across tasks. Using this approach, we are able to surpass single task fine-tuning methods while being parameter and data efficient (using around 66% of the data for weight updates). Compared to other BERT Large methods on GLUE, our 8-task model surpasses other Adapter methods by 2.8% and our 24-task model outperforms by 0.7-1.0% models that use MTL and single task fine-tuning. We show that a larger variant of our single multi-task model approach performs competitively across 26 NLP tasks and yields state-of-the-art results on a number of test and development sets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CAMTL/CA-MTL.

Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic "expansion" assumption, which states that a low probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.

We introduce a scattering covariance matrix which provides non-Gaussian models of time-series having stationary increments. A complex wavelet transform computes signal variations at each scale. Dependencies across scales are captured by the joint covariance across time and scales of complex wavelet coefficients and their modulus. This covariance is nearly diagonalized by a second wavelet transform, which defines the scattering covariance. We show that this set of moments characterizes a wide range of non-Gaussian properties of multi-scale processes. This is analyzed for a variety of processes, including fractional Brownian motions, Poisson, multifractal random walks and Hawkes processes. We prove that self-similar processes have a scattering covariance matrix which is scale invariant. This property can be estimated numerically and defines a class of wide-sense self-similar processes. We build maximum entropy models conditioned by scattering covariance coefficients, and generate new time-series with a microcanonical sampling algorithm. Applications are shown for highly non-Gaussian financial and turbulence time-series.

Two types of states are widely used in quantum mechanics, namely (deterministic-coefficient) pure states and statistical mixtures. A density operator can be associated with each of them. We here address a third type of states, that we previously introduced in a more restricted framework. These states generalize pure ones by replacing each of their deterministic ket coefficients by a random variable. We therefore call them Random-Coefficient Pure States, or RCPS. We analyze their properties and their relationships with both types of usual states. We show that RCPS contain much richer information than the density operator and mean of observables that we associate with them. This occurs because the latter operator only exploits the second-order statistics of the random state coefficients, whereas their higher-order statistics contain additional information. That information can be accessed in practice with the multiple-preparation procedure that we propose for RCPS, by using second-order and higher-order statistics of associated random probabilities of measurement outcomes. Exploiting these higher-order statistics opens the way to a very general approach for performing advanced quantum information processing tasks. We illustrate the relevance of this approach with a generic example, dealing with the estimation of parameters of a quantum process and thus related to quantum process tomography. This parameter estimation is performed in the non-blind (i.e. supervised) or blind (i.e. unsupervised) mode. We show that this problem cannot be solved by using only the density operator \rho of an RCPS and the associated mean value Tr(\rho A) of the operator A that corresponds to the considered physical quantity. We succeed in solving this problem by exploiting a fourth-order statistical parameter of state coefficients, in addition to second-order statistics. Numerical tests validate this result.

Infographics are an aesthetic visual representation of information following specific design principles of human perception. Designing infographics can be a tedious process for non-experts and time-consuming, even for professional designers. With the help of designers, we propose a semi-automated infographic framework for general structured and flow-based infographic design generation. For novice designers, our framework automatically creates and ranks infographic designs for a user-provided text with no requirement for design input. However, expert designers can still provide custom design inputs to customize the infographics. We will also contribute an individual visual group (VG) designs dataset (in SVG), along with a 1k complete infographic image dataset with segmented VGs in this work. Evaluation results confirm that by using our framework, designers from all expertise levels can generate generic infographic designs faster than existing methods while maintaining the same quality as hand-designed infographics templates.

Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful but computationally expensive machine learning models, requiring an estimate of the kernel covariance matrix for every prediction. In large and complex domains, such as graphs, sets, or images, the choice of suitable kernel can also be non-trivial to determine, providing an additional obstacle to the learning task. Over the last decade, these challenges have resulted in significant advances being made in terms of scalability and expressivity, exemplified by, e.g., the use of inducing points and neural network kernel approximations. In this paper, we propose inducing Gaussian process networks (IGN), a simple framework for simultaneously learning the feature space as well as the inducing points. The inducing points, in particular, are learned directly in the feature space, enabling a seamless representation of complex structured domains while also facilitating scalable gradient-based learning methods. We consider both regression and (binary) classification tasks and report on experimental results for real-world data sets showing that IGNs provide significant advances over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate how IGNs can be used to effectively model complex domains using neural network architectures.

We investigate the average value of the $p$th Dirichlet coefficients of elliptic curves for a prime p in a fixed conductor range with given rank. Plotting this average yields a striking oscillating pattern, the details of which vary with the rank. Based on this observation, we perform various data-scientific experiments with the goal of classifying elliptic curves according to their ranks.

This paper tackles the problem of decomposing binary data using matrix factorization. We consider the family of mean-parametrized Bernoulli models, a class of generative models that are well suited for modeling binary data and enables interpretability of the factors. We factorize the Bernoulli parameter and consider an additional Beta prior on one of the factors to further improve the model's expressive power. While similar models have been proposed in the literature, they only exploit the Beta prior as a proxy to ensure a valid Bernoulli parameter in a Bayesian setting; in practice it reduces to a uniform or uninformative prior. Besides, estimation in these models has focused on costly Bayesian inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet very efficient majorization-minimization algorithm for maximum a posteriori estimation. Our approach leverages the Beta prior whose parameters can be tuned to improve performance in matrix completion tasks. Experiments conducted on three public binary datasets show that our approach offers an excellent trade-off between prediction performance, computational complexity, and interpretability.

Machine learning training methods depend plentifully and intricately on hyperparameters, motivating automated strategies for their optimisation. Many existing algorithms restart training for each new hyperparameter choice, at considerable computational cost. Some hypergradient-based one-pass methods exist, but these either cannot be applied to arbitrary optimiser hyperparameters (such as learning rates and momenta) or take several times longer to train than their base models. We extend these existing methods to develop an approximate hypergradient-based hyperparameter optimiser which is applicable to any continuous hyperparameter appearing in a differentiable model weight update, yet requires only one training episode, with no restarts. We also provide a motivating argument for convergence to the true hypergradient, and perform tractable gradient-based optimisation of independent learning rates for each model parameter. Our method performs competitively from varied random hyperparameter initialisations on several UCI datasets and Fashion-MNIST (using a one-layer MLP), Penn Treebank (using an LSTM) and CIFAR-10 (using a ResNet-18), in time only 2-3x greater than vanilla training.  ( 2 min )

NOTE: This preprint has a flawed theoretical formulation. Please avoid it and refer to the ICLR22 publication https://openreview.net/forum?id=q7n2RngwOM. Also, arXiv:2109.15062 contains some new ideas on unobserved Confounding. As an important problem of causal inference, we discuss the identification and estimation of treatment effects under unobserved confounding. Representing the confounder as a latent variable, we propose Intact-VAE, a new variant of variational autoencoder (VAE), motivated by the prognostic score that is sufficient for identifying treatment effects. We theoretically show that, under certain settings, treatment effects are identified by our model, and further, based on the identifiability of our model (i.e., determinacy of representation), our VAE is a consistent estimator with representation balanced for treatment groups. Experiments on (semi-)synthetic datasets show state-of-the-art performance under diverse settings.  ( 2 min )

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been conducting a second iteration of the CTS challenge since August 2020. The current iteration of the CTS Challenge is a leaderboard-style speaker recognition evaluation using telephony data extracted from the unexposed portions of the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) and Multi-Language Speech (MLS) corpora collected by the LDC. The CTS Challenge is currently organized in a similar manner to the SRE19 CTS Challenge, offering only an open training condition using two evaluation subsets, namely Progress and Test. Unlike in the SRE19 Challenge, no training or development set was initially released, and NIST has publicly released the leaderboards on both subsets for the CTS Challenge. Which subset (i.e., Progress or Test) a trial belongs to is unknown to challenge participants, and each system submission needs to contain outputs for all of the trials. The CTS Challenge has also served, and will continue to do so, as a prerequisite for entrance to the regular SREs (such as SRE21). Since August 2020, a total of 53 organizations (forming 33 teams) from academia and industry have participated in the CTS Challenge and submitted more than 4400 valid system outputs. This paper presents an overview of the evaluation and several analyses of system performance for some primary conditions in the CTS Challenge. The CTS Challenge results thus far indicate remarkable improvements in performance due to 1) speaker embeddings extracted using large-scale and complex neural network architectures such as ResNets along with angular margin losses for speaker embedding extraction, 2) extensive data augmentation, 3) the use of large amounts of in-house proprietary data from a large number of labeled speakers, 4) long-duration fine-tuning.  ( 2 min )

Estimating the effects of continuous-valued interventions from observational data is critically important in fields such as climate science, healthcare, and economics. Recent work focuses on designing neural-network architectures and regularization functions to allow for scalable estimation of average and individual-level dose response curves from high-dimensional, large-sample data. Such methodologies assume ignorability (all confounding variables are observed) and positivity (all levels of treatment can be observed for every unit described by a given covariate value), which are especially challenged in the continuous treatment regime. Developing scalable sensitivity and uncertainty analyses that allow us to understand the ignorance induced in our estimates when these assumptions are relaxed receives less attention. Here, we develop a continuous treatment-effect marginal sensitivity model (CMSM) and derive bounds that agree with both the observed data and a researcher-defined level of hidden confounding. We introduce a scalable algorithm to derive the bounds and uncertainty-aware deep models to efficiently estimate these bounds for high-dimensional, large-sample observational data. We validate our methods using both synthetic and real-world experiments. For the latter, we work in concert with climate scientists interested in evaluating the climatological impacts of human emissions on cloud properties using satellite observations from the past 15 years: a finite-data problem known to be complicated by the presence of a multitude of unobserved confounders.  ( 2 min )

The great success of deep neural networks is built upon their over-parameterization, which smooths the optimization landscape without degrading the generalization ability. Despite the benefits of over-parameterization, a huge amount of parameters makes deep networks cumbersome in daily life applications. Though techniques such as pruning and distillation are developed, they are expensive in fully training a dense network as backward selection methods, and there is still a void on systematically exploring forward selection methods for learning structural sparsity in deep networks. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes a new approach based on differential inclusions of inverse scale spaces, which generate a family of models from simple to complex ones along the dynamics via coupling a pair of parameters, such that over-parameterized deep models and their structural sparsity can be explored simultaneously. This kind of differential inclusion scheme has a simple discretization, dubbed Deep structure splitting Linearized Bregman Iteration (DessiLBI), whose global convergence in learning deep networks could be established under the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz framework. Experimental evidence shows that our method achieves comparable and even better performance than the competitive optimizers in exploring the sparse structure of several widely used backbones on the benchmark datasets. Remarkably, with early stopping, our method unveils `winning tickets' in early epochs: the effective sparse network structures with comparable test accuracy to fully trained over-parameterized models, that are further transferable to similar alternative tasks. Furthermore, our method is able to grow networks efficiently with adaptive filter configurations, demonstrating a good performance with much less computational cost. Codes and models can be downloaded at {https://github.com/DessiLBI2020/DessiLBI}.  ( 3 min )

Generalization bounds are a critical tool to assess the training data requirements of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Recent work has established guarantees for in-distribution generalization of quantum neural networks (QNNs), where training and testing data are assumed to be drawn from the same data distribution. However, there are currently no results on out-of-distribution generalization in QML, where we require a trained model to perform well even on data drawn from a distribution different from the training distribution. In this work, we prove out-of-distribution generalization for the task of learning an unknown unitary using a QNN and for a broad class of training and testing distributions. In particular, we show that one can learn the action of a unitary on entangled states using only product state training data. We numerically illustrate this by showing that the evolution of a Heisenberg spin chain can be learned using only product training states. Since product states can be prepared using only single-qubit gates, this advances the prospects of learning quantum dynamics using near term quantum computers and quantum experiments, and further opens up new methods for both the classical and quantum compilation of quantum circuits.  ( 2 min )

We present a general framework for training safe agents whose naive incentives are unsafe. As an example, manipulative or deceptive behaviour can improve rewards but should be avoided. Most approaches fail here: agents maximize expected return by any means necessary. We formally describe settings with 'delicate' parts of the state which should not be used as a means to an end. We then train agents to maximize the causal effect of actions on the expected return which is not mediated by the delicate parts of state, using Causal Influence Diagram analysis. The resulting agents have no incentive to control the delicate state. We further show how our framework unifies and generalizes existing proposals.  ( 2 min )

Scientists frequently prioritize learning from data rather than training the best possible model; however, research in machine learning often prioritizes the latter. The development of marginal feature importance methods, such as marginal contribution feature importance, attempts to break this trend by providing a useful framework for explaining relationships in data in an interpretable fashion. In this work, we generalize the framework of marginal contribution feature importance to improve performance with regards to detecting correlated interactions and reducing runtime. To do so, we consider "information subsets" of the set of features $F$ and show that our importance metric can be computed directly after applying fair representation learning methods from the AI fairness literature. The methods of optimal transport and linear regression are considered and explored experimentally for removing all the information of our feature of interest $f$ from the feature set $F$. Given these implementations, we show on real and simulated data that ultra marginal feature importance performs at least as well as marginal contribution feature importance, with substantially faster computation time and better performance in the presence of correlated interactions and unrelated features.  ( 2 min )

I want to create a NN that takes these readings and makes predictions about "what will the readings be in 5 minutes if I turn the AC on?". I'm thinking of training it with "the angle of the sun at that time", "temp", "humidity", and "ac/heater/fan state"(3) and then extracting data pairs spaced by 5 minutes where the system was in that state for the entire interval. Then I'm thinking I should use the 5-minute-later apparent temp as the training output. So the NN ultimately answers the question "what would be the apparent temperature if the system were to be in the given state for the next 5 minutes?" Am I on the right track here? submitted by /u/HasFiveVowels [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/p0goniphaft111 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Illustrious_Row_9971 [link] [comments]

Like I mark some areas of my pictures and then selcect what should happend with them? submitted by /u/xXLisa28Xx [link] [comments]

Is artbreeder the best way to do it, or is there a better way? submitted by /u/xXNOdrugsForMEXx [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Programming is way more fun when you learn/work with someone. Help each other, ask questions, brainstorm, etc. There is just so much benefit to joining a community when you are in this field, especially when you cannot find the question you are looking for on stack overflow! 😉 This is the same thing with AI, and it is why a little less than two years ago I created a discord server. Where anyone learning or working in the field could come and share their projects, learn together, work together, and much more. The community has now over 20 000 members, which is unbelievable! So glad to see it growing and see everyone so active. We also have an amazing partnership with an AI company coming that is super exciting for the community. You definitely want to be there to enjoy all the benefits they will give us. Come join us if you are in the field of AI ! https://discord.gg/learnaitogether submitted by /u/OnlyProggingForFun [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/akolonin [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09123 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360079336_GAMe_changer_or_not_An_evaluation_of_interpretable_machine_learning_models_based_on_additive_model_constraints submitted by /u/Positive_Ad_1090 [link] [comments]

Kornia is a differentiable library for computer vision based on PyTorch. Does anyone have experience with their SIFT descriptor. What can you differentiate? submitted by /u/avd4292 [link] [comments]

When comes to evaluating and selecting a model, should one focus on minimizing loss (i.e., sparse categorical crossentropy) or obtain high rated metrics (i.e., f1)? Often time the model highest rated metrics would generate higher loss than ones with lower ratings in metrics during validation/test sets. Some would say focus on metrics as loss are for the machine to optimize learning, what stays in the training, stays in the training. However, wouldn't loss be also an important element to consider since it also describe the performance of the model, particularly when obtained from the test set? How should one prioritize? Metrics/loss rules all or seek for balance? submitted by /u/Hydraze [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Assume to have a 2-step algorithm: 1) aggregate data points into clusters 2) feed the clusters to a downstream task (e.g. classification, regression, etc). Is there any work that explores how to optimize the clustering in 1) to achieve the best performance in the downstream task 2)? One example would be a differentiable clustering algorithm that receives gradients from the downstream task or a parametrized clustering algorithm whose parameters are automatically tuned to increase the performance of the downstream task. I have found very little on this topic in the literature, could you point me to some relevant work? submitted by /u/fedetask [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am classifying social media posts (facebook, instagram), with emojis being upwards of 100% of content. For example, you may want to tag "🤮🤮🤮" as in need for moderation, and "🤔🤔🤔" as prioritized for a response. Looking for a good model to fine tune I found BerTweet, which seems at least somewhat emoji aware. However it also has a ton of out-of-vocabulary results, both for emoji and semi-common English words, despite it's liberal use of emoji.demojize and splitting up more complex emoji: ​ https://preview.redd.it/t6ai3o8le1v81.png?width=687&format=png&auto=webp&s=c16157addbe1b3d34858708f3e6c7517e64d26ec A model like `xlm-roberta-base with a larger vocabulary (250k) and more robust tokenization seems to have some 500 emoji directly in its vocabulary directly, without converting them to text. This seems potentially more promising, but also guarantees a token like 🤮 is just out of vocabulary rather than being interpreted by word pieces. Has anyone here had experience with dealing with emoji in text classification, and what approaches were most successful? submitted by /u/sanderbaduk [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, I have a question about how to use metric network after contrastive learning. If I have trained a network well with NCELoss, I would like to finetune this network to match the best output by input(It used at calculating NCELoss). Is there any good way to do it? ​ Thank you for reading! submitted by /u/Spiritual_Fig3632 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

We’d like to know if anyone is interested in participating in a mock peer review? Basically if you have a paper you’d like to get feedback on, and would like to review others’ papers in exchange, you’re welcome to continue reading. We are gauging public interest in mock peer review and exploring the possibility to host the reviews on DouBlind. We’d like to know your answers to the following questions: Are you interested in mock peer review? Do you want to do this privately (paper and review are kept inside a small group) or openly (paper and review are open)? How many papers do you like to review? Do you have any concerns? submitted by /u/DouBlindDotCOM [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

This is reproduced from Zhihu and translated by DeepL, only used for enthusiasts to communicate. ​ MindSpore, as an end-to-edge cloud collaborative full-scenario AI open source framework, takes into account the flexibility of academic research and the high-performance needs of industry, supports end-to-edge cloud full-scene business, and brings developers a simpler programming, easier debugging, superior performance, and more flexible deployment experience, which has received widespread attention and application in the industry and has been open source on 2020.3.28, and is the Gitee The highest index of open source software. Welcome to participate in open source contributions, model crowdsourcing collaboration, industry innovation and application, algorithm innovation, academic collabora…  ( 3 min )

Hi everyone, this is my first post please go easy on me. I'm currently playing around with a bigger Model in tf-agents. I worked only with structured data (TF, SKlearn, Pandas...). Now I'm struggling a bit with the preprocessing and where in the architecture to place it. I use multiple Inputs and encoding layers for each of them. For the training of the Encoders I used some SKLearn pre-processor (StandardScaler, MinMaxScaler, KBinsDiscretizer). I try to reuse the pre-processing pipeline in the model or extract the information for other pre-processing mechanisms(e.g. pre-processing tf layers) My current options I came up with: Incorporate it directly into the Environment and return the pre-processed observation Pro easy, can probably use my SKlearn pipeline Contra I'd like to keep the architecture clean, so the environment should only give out raw values and not prepared values for a certain model Use an environment wrapper around the "raw" environment Pro "raw" environment needs no tuning Contra not sure if I can use my pipeline here and not sure if I'm taking a bad path here Use pre-processing TF layers Pro most of the API is there and can be used in my Encodernetworks, seems to be the TFic way Contra the SKlearn pre-processor have values for each column. The layers (e.g. rescale ) seems to only take one configuration for a whole tensor. I could probably create a layer for each value in the Tensor but that doesn't feel that it is supposed to be like that. If you have more options or can share your experience one of the options mentioned above I would be very glad. submitted by /u/Kjiessar [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am using PPO in the context of multi-agent RL. I was wondering if PyTorch has a way of handling when hidden states should be reinitialized to zeros. What I have found is this implementation: def forward(self, x, hxs, masks): if x.size(0) == hxs.size(0): x, hxs = self.rnn(x.unsqueeze(0), (hxs * masks.repeat(1, self._recurrent_N).unsqueeze(-1)).transpose(0, 1).contiguous()) x = x.squeeze(0) hxs = hxs.transpose(0, 1) else: # x is a (T, N, -1) tensor that has been flatten to (T * N, -1) N = hxs.size(0) T = int(x.size(0) / N) # unflatten x = x.view(T, N, x.size(1)) # Same deal with masks masks = masks.view(T, N) # Let's figure out which steps in the sequence have a zero for any agent # We will always assume t=0 has a zero in it as that makes the logic cleaner has_zeros = ((masks[1:] == 0.0) .any(dim=-1) .nonzero() .squeeze() .cpu()) # +1 to correct the masks[1:] if has_zeros.dim() == 0: # Deal with scalar has_zeros = [has_zeros.item() + 1] else: has_zeros = (has_zeros + 1).numpy().tolist() # add t=0 and t=T to the list has_zeros = [0] + has_zeros + [T] hxs = hxs.transpose(0, 1) outputs = [] for i in range(len(has_zeros) - 1): # We can now process steps that don't have any zeros in masks together! # This is much faster start_idx = has_zeros[i] end_idx = has_zeros[i + 1] temp = (hxs * masks[start_idx].view(1, -1, 1).repeat(self._recurrent_N, 1, 1)).contiguous() rnn_scores, hxs = self.rnn(x[start_idx:end_idx], temp) outputs.append(rnn_scores) # assert len(outputs) == T # x is a (T, N, -1) tensor x = torch.cat(outputs, dim=0) # flatten x = x.reshape(T * N, -1) hxs = hxs.transpose(0, 1) submitted by /u/No_Possibility_7588 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

I don't think an opensource one exists but figured I'd ask here because you never know what's laying around the internet! As an aside, if one doesn't exist, let me know if you're interested in partnering in writing one! Edit: For anyone wondering I need the env to be in jax because my muzero implementation is in jax and I need the env to run on TPU cores, not CPU submitted by /u/evanatyourservice [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am looking for any papers that do the following: use neural networks in the RL pipeline as the state space is too large for calculating the optimal policy using the traditional tabular value iteration or policy iteration. In this setting, the model is completely known, i.e., no learning. Most papers I see with DeepRL assume that the transition probabilities are unknown and that they have access to a simulator that gives them the ability to query data points. I am looking for existing work in DeepRL where the transition probabilities are known but the problem is intractable using tabular methods. Any direction would be appreciated, thanks! submitted by /u/lolillini [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello, im making a new post as i couldnt find any answers to this before (although this reddit post is similar to my issue) I am trying to implement a simple multivariate Gaussian policy without neural networks, basically using a standard policy gradient update with SGD + score function gradient, without batches. The reason for this is to avoid unstable updates, meaning too large updates in mean/variance. The idea is thus to use a trust region update, to keep the updates within some reasonable size. I am a little confused regarding the maximization of the surrogate objective. As seen in this stackoverflow post, we wish to maximize [pi/pi_old] , compared to [log(pi)] in vanilla PG. Since i do not use automatic differentiation, but one single stochastic descent, how do I find the gradient of pi/pi_old ? To my understanding, the flow of the algorithm is this: sample experience -> compute new policy parameters -> compare with previous policy -> construct surrogate function -> perform SGD on surrogate to get the actual new policy It is the last step i am struggling with. submitted by /u/Acrobatic-Ad-9189 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'll be starting my work for object manipulation using deep RL, and i would like to get start from the scratch, please recommend the source, tools, and software used for this purpose. but not be working on modeling the robot, instead will be using any robot with gripper which can be interfaced with ROS. Also please link the github repositories which can be helpfull in the learning process Thanks submitted by /u/Western-Age3148 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I want to check policy-encoding mapping e : (S → A) → R^k in Universal Successor Features Approximators. I don't know how to embedding network to another network. There are too many weights! Do you have any ideas? Thank you for reading! submitted by /u/Spiritual_Fig3632 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Found a useful list of Tools, Frameworks, and Resources for RL/ML. It covers Reinforcement learning, Machine Learning (TensorFlow & PyTorch), Core ML, Deep Learning, Computer Vision (CV). I thought I'd share it for anyone that's interested submitted by /u/Khaotic_Kernel [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Posted by Ting Chen and David Fleet, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Object detection is a long-standing computer vision task that attempts to recognize and localize all objects of interest in an image. The complexity arises when trying to identify or localize all object instances while also avoiding duplication. Existing approaches, like Faster R-CNN and DETR, are carefully designed and highly customized in the choice of architecture and loss function. This specialization of existing systems has created two major barriers: (1) it adds complexity in tuning and training the different parts of the system (e.g., region proposal network, graph matching with GIOU loss, etc.), and (2), it can reduce the ability of a model to generalize, necessitating a redesign of the model for…  ( 7 min )

AWS CodeArtifact allows developers to connect internal code repositories to upstream code repositories like Pypi, Maven, or NPM. AWS CodeArtifact is a powerful addition to CI/CD workflows on AWS, but it is similarly effective for code-bases hosted on a Jupyter notebook. This is a common development paradigm for Machine Learning developers that build and train […]  ( 9 min )

Artificial Intelligence is all over the world today. From the use of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, to improving…  ( 2 min )

Different parts of the globe are experiencing distinct climate challenges — severe drought, dangerous flooding, reduced biodiversity or dense air pollution. The challenges are so great that no country can solve them on their own. But innovative startups worldwide are lighting the way, demonstrating how these daunting challenges can be better understood and addressed with Read article > The post By Land, Sea and Space: How 5 Startups Are Using AI to Help Save the Planet appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 3 min )

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I'm a software developer but I'm not really experienced in AI. Would it be best to train first for speech bubbles and separately for panel drawings? What kind of network is the best for this? Just thinking that it would be a cool project to have auto generated legible infinite comic strips for a semi niche comic strip that runs in my country. submitted by /u/dananite [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Content generation is such a time-suck for small businesses, and it seems like an interesting vertical to apply AI. The AI would generate the content after being given a prompt. There are already a few tools trying this, but the quality doesn't seem to be very high. Are there better tools that I'm missing, or is the consumer-facing software so early-stage that it would be better to hire a data scientist and train an AI system specifically for this purpose? https://www.reddit.com/r/MachinesWrite/comments/f45eav/list_of_ai_text_generators/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/axa8w3/ai_ml_text_generators/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 submitted by /u/CliffWoolum [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Here's a tutorial and lightweight PyTorch implementation of VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning. Hope you find it helpful! submitted by /u/thejashGI [link] [comments]

Deep neural network (DNN) models for object recognition and classification, such as Yolo, ResNet, and EfficientNet, are used in video analytics applications such as urban mobility and smart automobiles. There is a symbiotic link between edge computing and video analytics, claiming that live video analytics is the “killer app” for edge computing. Edge devices come in various sizes and designs, but they are always resource-constrained compared to the cloud. Video analytics deployments send the videos to on-premises edge servers. The article handles the difficulty of supporting inference and retraining jobs on edge servers simultaneously, which necessitates navigating the fundamental tradeoff between the accuracy of the retrained model and the accuracy of the inference. Edge computation is preferred for video analytics because it eliminates the need for expensive network lines to broadcast videos to the cloud while simultaneously preserving video privacy. Edge computation has a finite amount of resources (e.g., with weak GPUs). The mismatch between the increasing rate of model compute needs, and the total cycles of processors exacerbate this problem. As a result, model compression is used in edge deployments. Continue reading our bite on this research Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2021/07/nsdi22spring-final74.pdf Github: https://github.com/edge-video-services/ekya submitted by /u/No_Coffee_4638 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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CypherZilla on OpenSea https://reddit.com/link/u8he59/video/i9a29i5ywtu81/player submitted by /u/thecypherbeast [link] [comments]

https://www.sganalytics.com/blog/top-ethical-challenges-in-ai-the-price-of-progress/ submitted by /u/JencyJane [link] [comments]

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Hello I have a question. For example, in the case of an inverted pendulum or cartpole, I train the model for the pole to be at 0 degrees (vertical) and it works. Then I want this same model to keep the pole at another position, for example, 3 degrees, do I have to train this model again for achieving this to or can I somehow use the model I already trained and what it learnt and input the new position I want it to be? idk if I explained myself I guess its mostly doubts about how to interact with the model and how to properly use a model that has already been trained. If anyone has some example of code (python, gym), on interacting with a trained model it would be really helpful. submitted by /u/Sleyck [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://github.com/marlbenchmark/on-policy/blob/main/onpolicy/algorithms/r_mappo/r_mappo.py submitted by /u/No_Possibility_7588 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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I'm working on a project where I'm trying to prove the existence of a particular set of functions by showing it can be constructed as the solution to a Markov Decision Process. However, it seems that it's much simpler to convert it to a partially observable MDP, rather than a classic one. I know it's been proven that the set of optimal policies for a classic MDP is nonempty, and intuitively I feel like the same should hold for POMDPs, but I'm having a hard time finding a particular source proving such a thing. Does anyone know where I ought to look? submitted by /u/LessPoliticalAccount [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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In the first edition of the textbook, the section on actor-critic methods (link) describes the classical approach of using the temporal difference error 𝛿 to modify the probability of selecting action a in state s: https://preview.redd.it/fa35vut7ewu81.png?width=238&format=png&auto=webp&s=c1b8952b065a90ecd2b8c0c30b985e36d37dbc30 Then they briefly mention that one variation on the classical approach is to scale temporal difference error 𝛿 by the inverse of the probability of selecting the action a, where that probability is given by 𝜋(s, a): https://preview.redd.it/69gd3zmbdwu81.png?width=375&format=png&auto=webp&s=b66a7d5eef3c2b7bc256473aed728223921a751c They say: " These issues were explored early on, primarily for the immediate reward case (Sutton, 1984; Williams, 1992) and have not been brought fully up to date." This idea is relevant to a project I'm working on, and I'd like to read more about it. But the references seem to be dead ends: Sutton 1984 is his PhD thesis, which I can't find a digital copy of, and Williams 1992 is this paper, which doesn't seem to contain this idea. Also this section doesn't seem to appear in the second edition of the textbook. You folks are much smarter than I am: Does modifying the update in this way mean anything to you? Are there modern approaches that do something like this? Or should I assume it was a little-explored idea in the early days that has been more-or-less forgotten? Thanks very much! submitted by /u/Careless-Argument-37 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

I was wondering what methods there are for RL with time delay other than augmenting the state space with the action buffer or using a model to undelay the environment. I've seen this post How to deal with the time delay in reinforcement learning? - Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange however it's rather brief and I wondered if there were any more recent advancements. I am also struggling to understand partial trajectory resampling ( 2010.02966.pdf (arxiv.org) ) and the code in the accompanying repo. GitHub - rmst/rlrd: PyTorch implementation of our paper Reinforcement Learning with Random Delays (ICLR 2020) I was wondering how we can resample actions in environments with constant delays if those actions are used in the state space for all subsequent chosen actions? submitted by /u/SuperDuperDooken [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hi, I want to train my agent in the environment used in "Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments". Here is a video about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx_bgoTF7bs. Is the environment released? Thanks for reading. submitted by /u/Spiritual_Fig3632 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi everyone. Today we released the mGPT model: multilingual generative pre-trained transformer The checkpoints are available on Huggingface model page The example usage is at the Github repo https://github.com/ai-forever/mgpt The model has 1.3 billion parameters The context length is 512 tokens. The model can generate sequences after the input prompt, can be used for fine-tuning or for zero- and few-shot learning: from transformers import GPT2LMHeadModel, GPT2Tokenizer model_name = "sberbank-ai/mGPT" tokenizer = GPT2Tokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name) model = GPT2LMHeadModel.from_pretrained(model_name) model.cuda() model.eval() texts = [ "My favourite holiday is ", "Իմ սիրելի տոնն է ", "Моє улюблене свято ", "mi fiesta favorita es ", "मेरी पसंदीदा छुट्टी है", "我最喜欢的节日是", "Min…  ( 2 min )

Hi r/MachineLearning! I want to share with you a fun side project of mine on benchmarking the GPUs for deep learning: [project page]. https://preview.redd.it/7olwqyze5yu81.png?width=2041&format=png&auto=webp&s=25aecb9733366720a2be5cecc2048eb2a734c9b9 Here are some key features: It helps to estimate the runtime of algorithms on a different GPU. It measures GPU processing speed independent of GPU memory capacity. It contains adjustable weightings through interactive UIs. The project page also explains how this benchmark differs from existing ones, and why this benchmark is more relevant to academic research. I would love to know what you think! submitted by /u/roll-a-dice [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm using mbp 2015, it's a pretty solid laptop, I like it a lot, though it feels slow and I've started to look for a replacement. Given that I run all experiment on gpu dedicated servers, my laptop serves me as a typewriter, it's ok, but I'd like to get more out of it. Frankly I'm a bit disappointed by 2021 Macbooks, hope they'll be improved in 2022. Recently lambda labs together with razer announced their tensorbook https://lambdalabs.com/deep-learning/laptops/tensorbook , their pricing looks weird to me, the more you pay the more years of support you have, that's the only thing which differentiates base bundle from enterprise. Also there is no option to customize hardware for it, though basic bundle itself looks ok, its price is $3500 like M1 Max's. What's your opinion about this laptop in particular? would you buy it? generally this laptop looks like a cool thing to have for local model development even from a tent somewhere in Nepal, given that you have enough power banks to charge it. :) What's your choice of a laptop for DL? My biggest requirement is a durable laptop which will serve at least 5 years, better with NVIDA GPU for development and debugging. submitted by /u/taras-sereda [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

​ Transformations that alter the perception of target faces Paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115228119 Dataset: https://onemillionimpressions.com/ submitted by /u/joshuacpeterson [link] [comments]

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Here's a tutorial and lightweight PyTorch implementation of VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning. Hope you find it helpful! submitted by /u/thejashGI [link] [comments]

Hi folks. This morning I released the new cleanlab 2.0 Python package for automatically finding errors in datasets and machine learning/analytics with real-world, messy data and labels. tl;dr - cleanlab provides a framework to streamline data-centric AI. https://preview.redd.it/hq1kyasvwwu81.png?width=2279&format=png&auto=webp&s=4fa3c82ec66d685c8fc4f95c5d9a0fc4be192d6b After 1.0 launch last year, engineers used cleanlab at Google to clean and train robust models on speech data), at Amazon to estimate how often the Alexa device doesn’t wake, at Wells Fargo to train reliable financial prediction models, and at Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, etc. Joined by two good friends from grad school, we completely rebuilt cleanlab 2.0 to work for all data scientists, ML datasets, and models; and hit a…  ( 2 min )

If you are passionate about Data & AI we have the perfect challenge for you! The applications for Galp’s Hackathon Retail 4.0 are OPEN! With this Hackathon, Galp is challenging the community to propose solutions to specific problems and use cases that they think could improve their typical customer journey in the service stations. Gather a team and come up with an innovative solution for a chance of winning 10.000€! Let’s shape the future of Galp's retail? Apply now: https://taikai.network/en/galp/hackathons/retail40 https://preview.redd.it/wkfb6ybuwwu81.png?width=3334&format=png&auto=webp&s=deef13767df5ba607e387ce4e278ae3981d93582 submitted by /u/migueldsalmeida [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm working on a Machine Learning problem for multi class classification with imbalanced classes distribution, so obviously my model favours classes with more data and fails to predict classes with few data, what are the techniques I can use to help the model distinguish all the classes the same way ? P.S I'm avoiding to use SMOTE method to train the model on real used data rather than generated submitted by /u/According-Promise-23 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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Dear ML researchers, For the past many years, I've been updating my machine learning research notes for my PhD students and everyone online continuously. I don't like uploading to arxiv to get "citations", and GitHub serves me well: Hope they are useful for you: https://github.com/roboticcam/machine-learning-notes Richard, submitted by /u/MLknowledge [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I am performing a Image --> scalar regression. The output scalar I am trying to estimate follows a roughly Gaussian distribution. I notice that the DNN output is biased to output values towards the mean (makes sense). ​ This seems like a problem of imbalanced data. For classification, I can oversample minority classes. What is the equivalent for regression? Is there an equivalent technique for regression where we oversample "outliers" and undersample central values. submitted by /u/rsandler [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I made a video explaining the ideas behind building a Dense Passage Retriever(DPR). Whenever we talk about retrievers, we mostly refer to the DPR formulation which appeared in this paper. A lot of publicly available implementations also use this formulation. In a previous video, we discussed how to use the DPR End-to-End QA system which uses DPR with a QA model. In this video, we solely focus on retrievers and the ideas behind building them. The implementation is quite similar to retrievers pre-trained with Inverse Close Task. This video is part 8 of 9 video series on Open-domain question answering using Dense retrievers. Thanks for the support and I will appreciate any feedback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w61p0HLo7gc submitted by /u/infiniteakashe [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I have been studying super-resolution with gans and took a look at SRGAN et ESRGAN. I have spent the whole day running experiments in order to find if I can manage to overfit on a single batch of 16 / 32 / 128 examples (MNIST). I have found out that it's almost impossible to use this tactic as a sanity check because it simply cannot generate good quality samples. I would like to know what are your thoughts on this, and how you would run sanity checks regarding GANs. ​ Thank you ! submitted by /u/Frizzoux [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://www.amazon.science/blog/amazon-releases-51-language-dataset-for-language-understanding submitted by /u/__lawless [link] [comments]

Hi all, I have csv-files (~300) with a fixed set of columns (~40) but varying number of rows (sum of all rows ~300 000) and multiple labels per csv that I want to predict. Because of the limited number of csv-files and as a first try I am predicting the labels row-wise (attaching the label to all the rows of one csv-file) which works well for some labels but not for others. Currently, I am calculating some features for every row and just appending them to the row and some features for the whole csv-file and appending them to every row. Two problems are now arising that I would like to hear some input about: The number of features per csv is growing and it seems like a waste to copy them to every row. For some labels it is probably reasonable to throw away most of the rows and only feed in a handful. How would you design a structure that incorporates the limited number of csv-files and the different ways to treat features (row vs. csv)? submitted by /u/tlklk [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi! I am an undergrad and I am going to start my MS in CS this fall. My research interest is mainly in Multimodal Learning for language and Speech. I have written papers before but both my papers have been peer reviewed journal papers (Knowledge-Based Systems, Elsevier) [1] [2] I now want to start publishing papers in conferences since I have noticed that it is much easier to get noticed and recieve reviews when the paper is presented at a conference. I want to understand how different is the publication process for conferences? I also wanted recommendations on conferences in the NLP and Speech area, considering this will be my first conference paper. Thanks! (I would also appreciate reviews on my papers if anyone has the time to look them over. Thanks!) submitted by /u/prabhav55221 [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

Basically, I don't want to phrase this as a a "how-to" post but arxiv-sanity-lite really bothers me. How do you guys find recent papers in your area of interest which are promising besides following what is published at major conferences? I believe the website is "too lightweight". For example, what if I am interested in computer vision papers and I specify that in the tags field (i.e. explicitly typing "computer vision"). How can I list the papers based on a score (basically goodness of the paper)? Why does using shortcuts (basically links) like `````recommend over last week or recommend over last 3 days always (at least for me) end up with 0 results? I've never used the original arxiv-sanity before so I strongly believe that there is something that I am missing. submitted by /u/Icy_Fisherman7187 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has a vacancy for PhD Candidate within the DIGITALSEAICE project . The project aims to build a multi-scale digital infrastructure that integrates local and regional sea ice models for improved forecasting and understanding of variations in polar ice conditions. More information here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/224802/ submitted by /u/KatjaKim [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

We are working on a book that focuses on deep learning efficiency techniques such as quantization, pruning, distillation, etc. for both server-side as well as on-device (smartphones, IoT, etc.) applications. The goal is to introduce these ideas in a single place, without having to parse many papers, try to get a working code sample, and then spend time debugging. With the accompanying codelabs, we hope that our readers can make their models 4-20x smaller, faster, and better in quality. We have released the first four chapter's draft PDFs, and would truly appreciate any sort of comments / feedback. Book: efficientdlbook.com Feedback: hello@efficientdlbook.com submitted by /u/EfficientDLBook [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://youtu.be/ccBMRryxGog This video is an interview with Barret Zoph and William Fedus of Google Brain about Sparse Expert Models. Sparse Expert models have been hugely successful at distributing parts of models, mostly Transformers, across large array of machines and use a routing function to effectively route signals between them. This means that even though these models have a huge number of parameters, the computational load for a given signal does not increase because the model is only sparsely activated. Sparse expert models, such as Switch Transformers and GLAM can scale up to trillions of parameters and bring a number of desirable properties. We discuss everything from the fundamentals, history, strengths and weaknesses, up to the current state of the art of these models. ​ OUTLINE: 0:00 - Intro 0:30 - What are sparse expert models? 4:25 - Start of Interview 5:55 - What do you mean by sparse experts? 8:10 - How does routing work in these models? 12:10 - What is the history of sparse experts? 14:45 - What does an individual expert learn? 19:25 - When are these models appropriate? 22:30 - How comparable are sparse to dense models? 26:30 - How does the pathways system connect to this? 28:45 - What improvements did GLAM make? 31:30 - The "designing sparse experts" paper 37:45 - Can experts be frozen during training? 41:20 - Can the routing function be improved? 47:15 - Can experts be distributed beyond data centers? 50:20 - Are there sparse experts for other domains than NLP? 52:15 - Are sparse and dense models in competition? 53:35 - Where do we go from here? 56:30 - How can people get started with this? ​ Papers: Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03961) GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts (https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06905) Designing Effective Sparse Expert Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08906) submitted by /u/ykilcher [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Next week ICLR 2022 is taking place. Fully virtual and 1000+ high quality papers. To make sense of this volume of papers we have indexed the papers and provide an interactive semantic map of #ICLR2022, check out: https://search.zeta-alpha.com/?q=&d=ly&doc_sources=ICLR&sort_by=authority To enjoy the full map, click on [Explore more] and then enter full screen mode. We will also discuss the program and 10 must read papers in the Zeta Alpha "Trends in AI" ICLR edition webinar Monday 25th, for which you can sign up here. https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/7816505274568/WN_82DzwhXZQbOCSTWgaI9xMw Looking forward to meet you online at ICLR 2022! https://preview.redd.it/6wdqj4ru7uu81.jpg?width=2202&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c97417c9ea39919041949bf3aa38ad33bb6eca5a submitted by /u/EngineerZetaAlpha [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This article is reproduced from Zhihu and translated by DeepL for enthusiasts to communicate. 1. Research Background High dynamic range images (HDR) are mainly oriented to picture display technology. In a certain scene, if the range of high and low luminance areas exceeds the maximum luminance range of the image, the display effect will be greatly reduced, and HDR is to better solve this problem, it can record a broader range of luminance images, so as to obtain a more effective display effect. The current solution to the problem of generating high dynamic range images (HDR) focuses on the fusion of two low dynamic range (LDR) images of different exposures taken with the same camera. In such a solution by the camera shake or object movement during the exposure time to produce the proble…  ( 3 min )

I am having trouble finding some general information on this subject. I know I am down the rabbit hole when google doesn't have an answer. I want to know best practices and information on using clusters for machine learning with large amounts of data. I believe I have a close to an optimal solution but wanted to get some other opinions on the subject. My current setup: AWS EKS Kubernetes for a cluster Kubeflow for ML platform Katib for HPT jobs Pytorch for custom models Spot instance GPUs Lustre for file serving to the models My Data: Millions of Images stored in S3 ~50TB of data What is the most efficient way to move my data to the cluster? My current approach: Preprocess the data with a dedicated instance and store it in S3 Master runs on a dedicated node Katib spins up a set number of GPU spot nodes A claim is made, and an FSx Lustre system is generated for the pod Advantages: Very fast training and data movement with spot training Disadvantages: I have to spin up several Lustre systems for the training Preprocess the data with a dedicated instance and store it in S3 Possible alternative Same as above but use EFS as a distributed file system so I don't have to wait for Lustre Advantages: Potentially cheaper as I have only one FS Disadvantages: Slow throughput, read this was a bad idea Master runs on a dedicated node Other alternatives UseKatib spins up a PyTorch streaming function with S3(boosted transfer speed)set number of GPU spot nodes Every pod starts a claim is made and downloads data to an EBS Give up and switch to SageMakerFSx Lustre system is generated for the pod Anyone with experience in these technologies I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts. submitted by /u/thewineiswater [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am getting the same prediction for different inputs. I am trying to use a regressional neural network. Since data is huge, I am training one example at a time. Here is a simplified version of my code. model = Sequential() model.add(Dense(10000, input_dim=212207, kernel_initializer='normal', activation='relu')) model.add(Dense(100, activation='relu')) model.add(Dense(1, kernel_initializer='normal')) model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error', optimizer='adam') for i in range(10000000): #X is input with 212207 values #Y is a output value if i<6000000: model.fit(X.transpose(), Y, epochs=30, batch_size=1, verbose=0) else: prediction=model.predict(X.transpose()) I made sure that I am training on different examples and trying predictions on different examples. I am still getting the same prediction value for all testing inputs. I think I made some mistake in defining the model for regression neural network. Can you please check if the code is correct? submitted by /u/exoplanet_hunter [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Introduction I was puzzled the first time I saw bilinear transformations, also known as Möbius transformations. I was in a class where everything had been abstract and general, and suddenly thing got very concrete and specific. I wondered why we had changed gears, and I wondered how there could be much to say about something […] Fixed points of bilinear transformations first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 2 min )

This post looks at how to partition complexity between definitions and theorems, and why it’s useful to be able to partition things more than one way. Quadratic equations Imagine the following dialog in an algebra class. “Quadratic equations always have two roots.” “But what about (x – 5)² = 0. That just has one root, […] Partitioning complexity first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 4 min )

Posted by Alex Olwal, Research Scientist, Google Augmented Reality and Artem Dementyev, Hardware Engineer, Google Research As consumer electronics and internet-connected appliances are becoming more common, homes are beginning to embrace various types of connected devices that offer functionality like music control, voice assistance, and home automation. A graceful integration of devices requires adaptation to existing aesthetics and user styles rather than simply adding screens, which can easily disrupt a visual space, especially when they become monolithic surfaces or black screens when powered down or not actively used. Thus there is an increasing desire to create connected ambient computing devices and appliances that can preserve the aesthetics of everyday materials, while providing …  ( 7 min )

Amazon Textract is a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from any document or image. Amazon Textract now offers the flexibility to specify the data you need to extract from documents using the new Queries feature within the Analyze Document API. You don’t need to know the structure of the […]  ( 11 min )

Yes! You read the heading right. There’s indeed a difference between loss functions and Metrics in the field of Machine Learning. However…  ( 2 min )

MIT CSAIL scientists created an algorithm to solve one of the hardest tasks in computer vision: assigning a label to every pixel in the world, without human supervision.  ( 7 min )

A new machine-learning system may someday help driverless cars predict the next moves of nearby drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians in real-time.  ( 7 min )

Your next trip to the dentist might offer a taste of AI. Pearl, a West Hollywood startup, provides AI for dental images to assist in diagnosis. It landed FDA clearance last month, the first to get such a go-ahead for dentistry AI. The approval paves the way for its use in clinics across the United Read article > The post Tooth Tech: AI Takes Bite Out of Dental Slide Misses by Assisting Doctors appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 4 min )

The gods must be smiling this GFN Thursday — God of War today joins the GeForce NOW library. Sony Interactive Entertainment and Santa Monica Studios’ masterpiece is available to stream from GeForce NOW servers, across nearly all devices and at up to 1440p and 120 frames per second for RTX 3080 members. Get ready to Read article > The post GFN Thursday Is Fit for the Gods: ‘God of War’ Arrives on GeForce NOW appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 3 min )

Hi, I made a video explaining the ideas behind building a Dense Passage Retriever(DPR). Whenever we talk about retrievers, we mostly refer to the DPR formulation which appeared in this paper. A lot of publicly available implementations also use this formulation. In a previous video, we discussed how to use the DPR End-to-End QA system which uses DPR with a QA model. In this video, we solely focus on retrievers and the ideas behind building them. The implementation is quite similar to retrievers pre-trained with Inverse Close Task. This video is part 8 of 9 video series on Open-domain question answering using Dense retrievers. Thanks for the support and I will appreciate any feedback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w61p0HLo7gc submitted by /u/infiniteakashe [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/cjmodi306 [link] [comments]

We are searching for trustworthy volunteers with some free time who would like to contribute to a digital Ukrainian volunteer project. Our system heavily relies on an image recognition system with a number of specialized filters involvg facial recognition, object recognition, logo detection, photoshop detection etc. People with professional experience with any of these things is preferred, but novice ML people are welcome to join us in a different capacity. DM to learn more about the project, glad to discuss the details with you. submitted by /u/eelgirl [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

If you are employed as a data scientist and have survived (or strived!) in your position for more than a year, chances are you are at least a good data scientist. This is particularly true if you were promoted. The difference between a mediocre and a good data scientist will be the topic of a… Read More »18 Differences Between Good and Great Data Scientists The post 18 Differences Between Good and Great Data Scientists appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 6 min )

submitted by /u/No_Possibility_7588 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello Everyone, I apologize ahead of time if posts like this aren't looked well upon on this sub, but I couldn't find rules against this and I also think this is the best, most niche sub for my question. I also made a new account just to be safe haha. ​ Anyways, I will be graduating this spring with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Mathematics. I have been researching Machine Learning since my sophomore year (adversarial machine learning) under a professor at my university and recently took upon a second, concurrent research position in RL since last summer. ​ My goal is to get into a PhD program at a higher level than my current university (my current university is good, but doesn't really have much of an AI focus as I've already taken all the AI grad courses as an undergrad). I'm…  ( 3 min )

Hey everyone, I've recently started working on a task allocation problem using RL. I'd just like to make sure my thinking is correct on how to best approach the problem. At the moment, we have (effectively) a graph traversal sim for n number of agents, where the goal is to minimize the total distance over an episode, as determined by setting the correct tasks. The task supplied to each agent will determine the route that is taken, and therefore the distance. The current idea is to supply an input graph that also contains information on the current location of the agents. A second input would be the set of available tasks. The expected output would be done through a pointer network, where we produce a reordered set of the tasks in descending order of optimality. When step is called, the sim runs until a new task is needed (agent completes it's route). ​ In general, does anyone know a good way to represent the inputs and output of this problem? A pointer network seems like it could work to produce actions, but if I need to do a forward pass for every agent, it seems that there would be no consideration of other agents when determining tasks (We shouldn't have 2 agents doing the same task). For the graph representation, a graph nn seems like an obvious choice, but I just wanted to see if anyone had any insight on why they may or may not be used. submitted by /u/asdfsflhasdfa [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Can you name any good universities (with high acceptance rate) which are working on reinforcement learning for robotics and also accept students from other branches (i.e. Electrical, Mechanical Engineering). submitted by /u/Better-Ad8608 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

In the standard intro to RL book, I have read that any MDP that has finite actions and states is a finite MDP. But that limit is subjective. So there are approximately 1045. If I limit myself to 105 states, can I say that chess isn't a finite MDP? submitted by /u/BraveProfessional656 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am currently studying use cases of RL in finance/banking/insurance and I am keen to understand what are its advantages and disadvantages than traditional methods. submitted by /u/kachua26 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Posted by Chen-Yu Lee and Chun-Liang Li, Research Scientists, Google Research, Cloud AI Team Form-based document understanding is a growing research topic because of its practical potential for automatically converting unstructured text data into structured information to gain insight about a document’s contents. Recent sequence modeling, which is a self-attention mechanism that directly models relationships between all words in a selection of text, has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on natural language tasks. A natural approach to handle form document understanding tasks is to first serialize the form documents (usually in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom fashion) and then apply state-of-the-art sequence models to them. However, form documents often have more complex layouts …  ( 8 min )

I stumbled upon this JD from Hitachi Energy, which mentions PINN in the section of preferred background: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2923292435/ Is PINN gaining more attention? And are there more players? submitted by /u/Kohomologia [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi all I'm keeping an eye on state of the art in quantum hardware, but what about software? I can think of many questions and maybe some of you are in the field. What should be the impact of quantum on ML/DL, realistically? What might be a roadmap for the software? And would quantum simulators do already have some benefits on AI? What are the best projects out there? I've seen many but haven't been very convinced submitted by /u/IntelligentHat1657 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, ML freelancers. I'm starting a freelancing marketplace, tailored only for AI talents, and I especially care about the welfares of freelancers, and plan to add these: (1) you will be more treated as the employees of the platform, thus we provide training(for all), potentially health care plan(for people have stably worked >20 hours a week), and career advance plan, mentors from experienced freelancers where you get to learn (2) open discussion between employers and you so that you can scope the project better, set a reasonable rate, and timeline (3) we potentially provide MLOPs tool to improve your productivity. (4) we avoid global competition by matching business only with local region-freelancer or areas that are more expensive. How attractive do you think this will be? And any of these benefits already been provided by upwork, freelancer, toptal, fierr? submitted by /u/meame2010 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Diffusion models have been behind a recent string of impressive generative results, including OpenAI's DALL-E 2. They’re powered by a simple yet expressive core mechanism. New video covering how they work: https://youtu.be/fbLgFrlTnGU submitted by /u/ariseff [link] [comments]

Interested in how DoorDash maintains a well performing and diverse selection in the numerous markets they operate in despite entering the delivery market relatively late ? I had the opportunity to collaborate in this project which involved building a number of models that measured customer preferences, identified market cuisine categories, and predicted merchants' performance on the platform. I wanted to share the approach and some of the technical details with the ML community to get feedback on what we can improve and to show this cool use case to others working on similar sales enablement based models. Check out the blog post I wrote and let me know what you think of our approach. Building the Model Behind DoorDash’s Expansive Merchant Selection submitted by /u/EfficientString7431 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I took a break from deep learning( starting from last October) , now i want to get back, start with a new project and read papers . Where should i focus ? Should i keep working on vision transformers or maybe start something on geometric deep learning . What's hot and what's going on ? submitted by /u/ovotheking [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://github.com/sovit-123/yolov1_pytorch_voc07 ​ Also, I write about Deep Learning and Machine Learning on https://debuggercafe.com/ Please check it out and let me know if somebody wants any blog posts on a specific topic. submitted by /u/sovit-123 [link] [comments]

Hi all!, Really excited to share a project we've been working on and get your feedback! We've made: Programmatic — an NLP annotation tool for building large labeled datasets for NLP without manual annotation Programmatic is like a REPL for data annotation. You: 1. Write simple rules/functions that can approximately label the data 2. Get near-instant feedback across your entire corpus 3. Iterate and improve your rules Finally, it uses a Bayesian label model [1] to convert these noisy annotations into a single, large, clean dataset, which you can then use for training machine learning models. You can programmatically label millions of datapoints in the time taken to hand-label hundreds. What we do differently from weak supervision packages like Snorkel/skweak[1] is to focus on UI to …  ( 2 min )

There are many projects promoting in this sub, you may like or dislike. And if any of my posts you dislike, allow me to apologize first. However, it gets me to think. Several years ago I'm a moderator in a quite large forum, because I don't have enough time to fulfill my responsibilities, then I decided to retire (yes, they can, and I remained as the vip user which only retired moderators can be). This is a large community, a machine learning community. Besides continuously removing some of these posts, and no clear rules on it, can we do any better? We got all the data, and we just cannot train the model? Here are my three proposal, and please give some excellent ideas besides my poor ones: Self promoting post should have values other than itself, and not having annoying contents Self promoting project can be used as a tool in a non self promoting posts, as long as the posts creates valuable contents and the promoting is not obvious and annoying. Depends on the number of new project posts, Weekly/Daily project post can be created by moderator and pinned to the top. All the promoting content goes into the comment. We can explore and upvotes. Here are some illustrations: 1. Direct Promoting Post ​ 2. Indirect Promoting Post ​ Weekly/Daily Promoting Post by Moderator, Pinned to Top, Comments by project owner, upvotes/downvotes by us Which do you think is acceptable? Or you have better ideas? Leave a comment. It's a machine learning sub, don't make machine to solve it better than us. View Poll submitted by /u/Remote_Cancel_7977 [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

Hey folks, I wrote a mini project based on JAX for optical communications signal processing. https://github.com/remifan/commplax I have a research article as a use case demo, https://remifan.github.io/gdbp_study/article.html This tool essentially implements adaptive DSP equalizers as stateful NN layers (thanks to Jax's explicit stateful syntax) implements compositor interfaces from scratch to wrap up those stateful layers with other regular NN layers so that they can be trained together Homebrew serial compositions of stateful layers It is a fun project for me and I feel JAX really elegantly fits this research use. What do you think about JAX? I appreciate your comments:) submitted by /u/StreetPrice1909 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi guys, I've been working on a machine learning project and I wanted to see how hardware resources are being used when I run inference on let's say 1000 images. How could i calculate the CPU(running inference on CPU)/RAM workload in that timeframe? I'm running it on a Linux Ubuntu VM. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Fifi0912 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm working on a framework Mercury for converting Python notebooks into interactive web apps. It can add widgets to the notebook based on the YAML configuration. End-user can tweak widgets values and execute the notebook. The resulting notebook can be downloaded as single-file HTML. Simple. The framework is built on Django+React. It is easy to deploy to Heroku or other cloud services. Recently, I made it possible to deploy it to Hugging Face Spaces (faster and larger machines than on free tier Heroku). The process of deployment is simple. You need to create a Gradio app on Spaces (my framework is not supported, yet ;) ). You need to add the app.py file that will run the Mercury server and upload the notebook. You can check the details in the docs. The HF Space with example notebook https://huggingface.co/spaces/pplonski/deploy-mercury submitted by /u/pp314159 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I would like to test the architecture from the following paper with a different dataset: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/19/3834 The authors state that their objective function is the following: https://preview.redd.it/u78f27jb6nu81.png?width=1027&format=png&auto=webp&s=32790a67ec829a1e79b252edd0714b8b3b5a7f4e Where: -x is the real grayscale image. -s is its downsampled version, which should be used both as the initial imput of the generator performing the super-resolution and as a first conditional variable in the learning process. -e is another two-dimensional array containing values for a second additional conditional variable. The authors, however, state that this should be implemented by using two separate conditional adversarial losses, one for each of the conditional variables. To clarify, the first adversarial loss should be: AdvLoss1(ParametersG, ParametersD) = - Log(Discriminator(x,s) - Log(1-Discriminator(Generator(s),s) While the second would be: AdvLoss2(ParametersG, ParametersD) = - Log(Discriminator(x,e) - Log(1-Discriminator(Generator(s),e) Which should be then summed up for the backward pass. In my pytorch implementation, however, I have only been able to set up a unique adversarial loss, which could be defined as: CurrentAdvLoss(ParametersG, ParametersD) = - Log(Discriminator(x,(s,e)) - Log(1-Discriminator(Generator(s),(s,e)) I have tried to implement implemented as follows:(simplified version) which I calculate in the following training loop (simplified version, from the same question asked in the Pytorch forum) as errD and errG after conditioning the network on both s and e at the same time: https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/conditional-gan-with-multiple-adversarial-losses/149627 My question is, is there a way to modify the following loop to obtain outputs that have been separately conditioned only first on s and then on e and thus calculate the two separate adversarial losses originally proposed by the authors instead? submitted by /u/Franken91 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

This is the discussion for accepted/rejected papers in IJCAI 2022. Results are supposed to release today. submitted by /u/errohan400 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07953v1 Code: https://github.com/decurtoydiaz/learning_with_signatures Tangential resources of interest: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08494, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_path#Signature, and https://labelerrors.com/ Personally, I believe from their code on Github, they have a possible data leakage (in the same vein of the current issue raised there) as well as an accuracy of 100% on a test set is fishier than a fish market. However, I am very curious to hear from the court of public opinion. How is everyone feeling about this? submitted by /u/blingblingbeepbeep [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

I have a dataset of points cloud where each point in the point cloud has a variable. I am trying to relate the local geometry features to that point variable by using FPFH, This means I am generating my own features from the dataset by first using an area of n-points to compute normal-vector estimations and from x normal vector estimations to compute the FPFH. However, the numbers x and n are arbitrary and other combinations might describe the target variable better. So I wanted to know if there was a method to evaluate how good a given x and n value are at describing the target variable. I considered the correlation between the features (n,x) and the target variable but I read that this assumes linear combination redundancy. I am using scikit-learn. So basically I have features X(x,n) and a target variable Y. Which x and n, in the feature space X(x,n), describes the target variable, Y, best. I want to do it before the training because when I try to train it with my random forest regressor it takes 3-4 hours and I want to test for more combinations. submitted by /u/Neo-Rushdian [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

The article is reproduced from Zhihu, using deepl machine translation, for all enthusiasts to communicate Abstract Deep learning frameworks are the engines and motors for pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence applications, and good deep learning frameworks can dramatically shorten the cycle of algorithm innovation and validation. In this report, we focus on the newly launched MindSpore framework, which has received a lot of industry attention, and systematically explore its model training speed on GPU clusters and compare it with popular international frameworks. In the evaluation experiments, we choose two classical models, ResNet and BERT-base, to test and analyze their performance with the same algorithm, the same dataset, and the same or similar performance hardware platf…  ( 7 min )

You can see the 200 lines code here: https://nn.labml.ai/diffusion/ddpm/index.html and https://github.com/cloneofsimo/minDiffusion, math is here: https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2021-07-11-diffusion-models/ The algo is smart and simple, but it's generation result seems more incredible than GANs, and its speed is fast, the model size is not too big: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ , https://huggingface.co/spaces/multimodalart/latentdiffusion, https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2 So 1st question: why is diffusion model so powerful? Can someone explain it? 2st question: Has anyone used diffusion for NLP? ​ UPDATED: ​ \"A multiverse portal to a new world opening up above Tokyo\" by dalle2 (from r/dalle2) \"A robot painting on a canvas while playing the piano\" by dalle2 (from r/dalle2) ​ \"Mona Lisa in her studio painting Leonardo da Vinci \" by dalle2 (from r/dalle2) \"Science fiction illustration future city in the night | impressionism\" by latentdiffusion ​ \"Science fiction illustration of Beauty and monsters | impressionism\" by latentdiffusion ​ \"a painting of a girl with a fox sitting in a field at sunrise in the style of Claude Monet\" by latentdiffusion submitted by /u/ghosthamlet [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

I am looking to build a new PC but have struggled to find the info on how Intel's latest CPUs perform for data science/ML, so if anyone is using one for that purpose and can help with one or more of these questions it would be very helpful! Apologies if these questions should be directed elsewhere. I am planning to use WSL2/Ubuntu but have heard that Intel's thread director isn't implemented well yet in Linux (or Windows 10!), so it doesn't assign tasks properly. Has anyone experienced issues with this firsthand? Assuming the thread director is working, are the e-cores utilised at all in any typical DS workflows? E.g. will they get used with joblib or when training scikit-learn/gbms in parallel? Are the e-cores good enough to handle other stuff like web browsing etc whilst the p-cores are maxed out on model training, or is it still necessary to keep at least one p-core free to avoid crashing the PC? Also I have read that in Windows 11 (where the thread director works best) that the active window/tab could be assigned p-cores as a priority, which isn't very helpful for someone who needs to train models in the background etc, but not sure whether this is actually happening in practice. The consensus from benchmarks/reviews is that the hybrid architecture 'just works' and is superior to AMD right now, but those benchmarks are primarily for use in gaming/video editing. submitted by /u/FightingLikeBeavers [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

We’re thrilled to announce a brand new Machine Learning Specialization, in collaboration with DeepLearning.AI, launching in June on Coursera! Learn essential real-world skills from AI pioneer Andrew Ng, who co-founded Google Brain and Coursera, led AI research at Baidu, and has impacted millions of AI learners. This updated 3-course Specialization will cover the latest machine learning techniques as well as foundational AI concepts that made its predecessor one of the world’s most popular machine learning courses. Join the waitlist! https://preview.redd.it/yujr31t6vku81.png?width=5000&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f4c4ef090bcdc7cfb04ee2c817d766f23c236a6 submitted by /u/Stanford_Online [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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A few years back I developed a very simple app just to show a few bible verses. Though it is a very simple app, it got more than 50K installs without much promotion. So, I am thinking about promoting it. But hesitate to do it as it is very simple app. So, I would like to add some useful feature before start promoting it. I would like to add a feature which will allow the users to ask any question related to bible, and it should be giving relevant answer. I assume that some bible data is open source. Is there any free tutorial available to know about how to implement AI based chat system for answering any bible related queries after training with bible data. Is there any app already providing this feature? submitted by /u/qptbook [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

But can technology be controlled to avoid adverse outcomes? Let's understand how AI will help us to make a better world. https://us.sganalytics.com/blog/top-ethical-challenges-in-ai-the-price-of-progress/ submitted by /u/JencyJane [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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I got an email from a student in France who asked about a French counterpart to my post on Morse code palindromes, and this post is a response to that email. Palindromes A palindrome is a word that remains the same when the letters are reversed, like kayak. A Morse code palindrome is a word […] French palindromes and Morse code first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 2 min )

Blaschke factors are complex functions with specified zeros inside the unit disk. Given a complex number a with |a| < 1, the Blaschke factor associated with a is the function Notice the semicolon in b(z; a). This is a convention that a few authors follow, and that I wish more would adopt. From a purely […] Blaschke factors first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 2 min )

To start deeply investigating the AI app development process, it’s important to first understand how these projects differ from regular app…  ( 9 min )

Hi, I've been working on a project for my computer science class and everything has been working up until the training. I'm following a guide online that has worked fairly well. Whenever I try to train, however, I run into an overflow error and the entire network dies. I'm not sure where to go from here as I've tried a few steps to fix the issue, if anyone could offer up some advice to fixing my problem that would be amazing. submitted by /u/djm710 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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I read a paper and was a little bit confused: In the paper it said: "Imagine you have a two dimensional (binary input) classification (0 or 1) problem and you use Sigmoid as an acitivation function. Since the Sigmoid gives you a real number between 0 and 1, it's not really classification anymore. Therefore you take the input of Sigmoid (y_Sigmoid) and put this into a modified heaviside function H(y-0.5) (so for y_Sigmoid bigger than 0.5, it gives you yHeavi = 1) The decision boundary is given by a straight line w1a1+w2a2+w0=0 and this whole process, it only works with the Sigmoid function as first activation function." The last paragraph confused me. Why can I assume that the decision boundary is exactly that (It's just the "normal decision boundary" for a SLP, why does it work here a also) and why does it work with only Sigmoid Function as first activation function submitted by /u/LawlHeyman [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I want to create a program that can take music i feed it and over time create its own music based on the inputs. I know i have to use a neural network and deep learning algorithms but how do i get started. Thanks. submitted by /u/Saxy-Snark [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

A demonstration of the RvS policy we learn with just supervised learning and a depth-two MLP. It uses no TD learning, advantage reweighting, or Transformers! Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is conventionally approached using value-based methods based on temporal difference (TD) learning. However, many recent algorithms reframe RL as a supervised learning problem. These algorithms learn conditional policies by conditioning on goal states (Lynch et al., 2019; Ghosh et al., 2021), reward-to-go (Kumar et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2021), or language descriptions of the task (Lynch and Sermanet, 2021). We find the simplicity of these methods quite appealing. If supervised learning is enough to solve RL problems, then offline RL could become widely accessible and (relatively) easy to implemen…  ( 5 min )

Organizations use collaborative document authoring solutions like Salesforce Quip to embed real-time, collaborative documents inside Salesforce records. Quip is Salesforce’s productivity platform that transforms the way enterprises work together, delivering modern collaboration securely and simply across any device. A Quip repository captures invaluable organizational knowledge in the form of collaborative documents and workflows. However, finding […]  ( 6 min )

As cloud-based business intelligence becomes more and more popular in the market, one name has made quite a mark: Power BI. A Microsoft offering, Power BI is an interactive data visualization and analytics tool that promises to revolutionize business. Here are some of its key benefits to help you see how it can do that:… Read More »How Microsoft Power BI Revolutionizes Business The post How Microsoft Power BI Revolutionizes Business appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 3 min )

Introduction In recent years technology has become prominent, both at work and at home. Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are evolving quickly today. Almost everyone will have some interaction with a form of AI daily. Some common examples include Siri, Google Maps, Netflix, and Social media (Facebook/Snapchat).AI and ML have popularly used buzzwords… Read More »How AI and ML are transforming data quality management? The post How AI and ML are transforming data quality management? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 4 min )

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the difference between Agile and business agility and how Agile 2 addresses some of the omissions and failings of traditional Agile.  Both Agile and Agile 2 focus on accelerating digital development; however, the benefits of any Agile approach can be obviated if it is not implemented… Read More »Agile, Agile 2 and Agility, Part II The post Agile, Agile 2 and Agility, Part II appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 4 min )

Your regulatory data project likely has no use case for design-time data lineage. tl/dr Mapping Data Lineage at design time, for its own end, has no regulatory use case or ROI.  Buying a specialist tool to support that mapping has even less ROI.  Regulations see that kind of documentary data lineage as ancillary at best.… Read More »Do regulatory data projects really need design-time data lineage? Probably not. The post Do regulatory data projects really need design-time data lineage? Probably not. appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 10 min )

During the 1990s, the physics community began to measure the brightness of certain supernovae in a novel way. This new method supported the conclusion Edwin Hubble had first arrived at in 1929 after discovering that galaxies are becoming more and more distant from us: Dark matter and dark energy play a role in why those… Read More »Dark Energy, Dark Data The post Dark Energy, Dark Data appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 4 min )

According to the predictions of Garter, by 2024, distributed cloud computing opportunities will be offered by most cloud vendors on a service basis. With the increasing rush in the cloud space and digitalization of documentation, this industry is bound to grow. Understanding Distributed Cloud Distributed cloud is an innovation to traditional cloud computing. It means… Read More »5 Main Benefits of Distributed Cloud Computing The post 5 Main Benefits of Distributed Cloud Computing appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 5 min )

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Hi there! Chatbots are not the "set and forget" thing like many other software. If you want to achieve great results with your chatbot, you need to improve it constantly. To know where and what to improve, you need to track and monitor chatbot analytics and the main chatbot metrics. General chatbot metrics Total number of users User satisfaction Accuracy of the chatbot Engagement metrics Active users New users Conversation Length Retention Rate Bounce Rate Flow Completion Rate Conversational analytics Goal Completion Rate (GCR) Fallback Rate Human Takeover Rate * Bonus: Revenue metrics Revenue generated ROI / payback period Here in the article we covered how to calculate each metrics, and you can find needed metrics depending on the industry you working in https://botscrew.com/blog/chatbot-metrics/?utm_source=RedditArtificial&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=&utm_term=&utm_content= submitted by /u/Avandegraund [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hello everyone , can someone recommend me for some good courses to do , I saw some courses on udemy , this one worth it? https://www.udemy.com/course/artificial-intelligence-az/ or I can learn everything on youtube? there are few more on udemy but I don't know how good they are .. is it worth buying one of those or there are better videos on youtube? EDIT : I found another 4 courses : https://www.udemy.com/course/100-days-of-code/ https://www.udemy.com/course/complete-python-bootcamp/ https://www.udemy.com/course/python-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-bootcamp/ https://www.udemy.com/course/machinelearning/ Which one of them would you recommend the most? submitted by /u/Edrixor [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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I am having a difficult time understanding Default Theory and the various methods e.g Makinson to find the extension of default theories submitted by /u/cocag13996 [link] [comments]

This I looked through the available ones, not a single one seems to match it. Sorry if this isn't the right sub to ask, but since Replica Studios doesn't have its own sub I don't know where submitted by /u/AxySmarts [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hello all, I know that there is a lot going on this field. I would like to get started on it, study more.. And as always, I like to start from the basis. Do you have any resource (video, article, book) good to star with? I know there are Autoencoders and Statistical models.. But how to know more, where/how do you keep studying? submitted by /u/bollolo [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am working on my research paper and would like to find resources which show the case studies of ML projects from the beginning to the end, doesn't matter if it failed or succeeded. submitted by /u/mkonu [link] [comments]

Hello there! I hope you have a great day! Currently I want to compare how good multiple GANs (Vanilla GAN, WGAN, DCGAN, ...) are for a given use case. Therefore I trained the various GAN versions with data of two different classes (i.e. apple and banana). Now I want to show that data I generate with the Generator can be used to train i.e. a classifier that can distinguish between real images of apples and bananas. Can I somehow create labels for the data I generate with the Generator in a smart way? So that I know that a generated image of the generator should for example be an apple? How do i do that? submitted by /u/Bonkikong [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Luminide introduces a new optimization, called Early Ranking, which makes it easier to build better AI models. Early Ranking achieves the same AI training results with up to 10x less compute – this saves time, reduces costs, and increases model accuracy. Luminide's IDE is a customized version of JupyterLab with integrated AI dev tools. Luminide used Early Ranking to place Top 1% in the CVPR Plant Pathology Kaggle competition. You can read about how we developed our winning model, and you can too, in our new blog post: Better Automation for Higher Accuracy AI Models. Class activation maps give insights into Luminide's winning model. Luminide is a new cloud platform for AI model development. Check out our demo video for a quick overview, or try it for yourself (sign up today and receive 100 hours of free GPU cloud compute). submitted by /u/LuminideInc [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, reddit. Recently, I'm looking into freelancer career path. Currently, I'm a researcher at a top company. So far, I know there is toptal, upwork, and freelancers. Checked them out, and seems toptal you still end up working for large corporate and mostly end up as full-time contractor which is not really a different or better option than my current work. Freelancers has too many bidders from developing countries. Besides what platform to use, i have more questions in terms of what obstacles we are facing to be freelancer ML engineer? Even though i am in AI and a researcher, but i have never deployed a model in production. Usually a task at big company takes a team or multiple teams to complete the MLOPs lifecycle, how can you do it as a single person? Any sharing of experience would be of great help. submitted by /u/meame2010 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hello everyone, I am a student from Germany writing my master thesis on Digital Transformation in ASEAN with AI/ML. For my thesis I would like to interview AI/ML experts from the ASEAN region to talk about the digital development of each country, challenges and potentials. (If you are not native there, but you have a work connection or just knowledge about the region and its AI development, I appreciate that as well.) It would be awesome if some of you were open to talk to me. A few sentences are enough, I won't take much of your time. If you want, we can do a video call as well. I will quote you of course. Thank you guys. submitted by /u/BlueLagoon357 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm trying to find literature on solving the following issue: In most probabilistic ML models, we model the joint distribution over a set of random variables, p(x1, ..., xN). If N is very large (e.g. 100, 500, or even 1000), then regardless of how you model this, the distribution's highest point of density is still quite tiny. E.g. if you consider an isotropic multivariate gaussian of 100 dimensions, the highest point of density will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.6e-40. So when it comes time to evaluate log likelihood for a model like this, the probability is numerically 0, so the log probability goes to negative infinity. ​ Is there work around solving these kinds of issues? I.e. by constraining the model in some way, or scaling model output, etc? I've done some googling, but am having a hard time finding papers on the subject. Not even sure what to call the problem... Curse of dimensionality in PGMs? ​ Any recommendations of papers / talks / etc is greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/CS_Student95 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

​ https://i.redd.it/v61jw1fekiu81.gif Abstract: We present a framework for training GANs with explicit control over generated facial images. We are able to control the generated image by settings exact attributes such as age, pose, expression, etc. Most approaches for manipulating GAN-generated images achieve partial control by leveraging the latent space disentanglement properties, obtained implicitly after standard GAN training. Such methods are able to change the relative intensity of certain attributes, but not explicitly set their values. Recently proposed methods, designed for explicit control over human faces, harness morphable 3D face models (3DMM) to allow fine-grained control capabilities in GANs. Unlike these methods, our control is not constrained to 3DMM parameters and is extendable beyond the domain of human faces. Using contrastive learning, we obtain GANs with an explicitly disentangled latent space. This disentanglement is utilized to train control-encoders mapping human-interpretable inputs to suitable latent vectors, thus allowing explicit control. In the domain of human faces we demonstrate control over identity, age, pose, expression, hair color and illumination. We also demonstrate control capabilities of our framework in the domains of painted portraits and dog image generation. We demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. submitted by /u/Illustrious_Row_9971 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I know that the publishers of the leading journals are mostly for-profit organization, that is weird because as researchers in the field we really “volunteer” for a free peer review or even pay to publish papers and read papers. On the other hand, i wasnt able to find information about the funding and profit goals of the leading conferences. Take NeuroIPS for example, i found that it is organized by “NeurIPS Foundation” but what exactly is this foundation - i couldn’t find any information about this subject. My point is, if the conferences are non-profit, sounds like they should be preferred over funding a for-profit organizations. submitted by /u/Careful_Winner_2335 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I've been writing tutorials with Pinferencia and HuggingFace. HuggingFace is quite handy and easy to use. I want to write some tutorial about computer vision afterwards. Is there anything similar in Computer vision area? submitted by /u/Remote_Cancel_7977 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

I took a look at multiple of them and I was curious why they seemed to benchmark on multiple datasets but for the training, they restrained themselves to only 1 for training instead of merging them. From that they get good scores on the one they trained on, but bad ones for the rest. submitted by /u/raysamram [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

You can now load multiple transformers (each model has a unique sparsification recipe) on top of the DeepSparse server behind Streamlit, and it's open-source. This was battle tested on a 16GB of RAM with only 4 core CPU virtual machine. These compute requirements are enough to load up to 19 sparse BERT models in memory and compare their performance on question answering (P.S. they are really fast on just CPUs). 💻code: https://github.com/neuralmagic/deepsparse/tree/main/examples/sparseserver-ui submitted by /u/Quantum_Stat [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This paper reports "results on AFHQ dataset, Four Shapes, MNIST and CIFAR10 achieving 100% accuracy on all tasks." The authors used few-shot classification "by comparing each test sample (after optional augmentation and computation of the element-wise mean) against a representative element-wise mean signature computed by averaging the signatures of a given number of train samples." What are your thoughts on this? Learning with Signatures - https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07953 submitted by /u/Marmadelov [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Github - Bangla Spoken Number Recognition Dataset - Our custom dataset on Bangla Numerals Publications - Though its on (0-9) digits We have created a simple speech recognition system for recognizing Bangla numerals from '০-৯৯'(0-99). In this project, audio samples from different genders, age groups, and dialects of Bangladeshi people were used to create a speech dataset of spoken numbers from '০-৯৯'(0-99). The raw speech data is subjected to various audio augmentation techniques such as time shift, speed tuning, background noise mixing, and volume tuning. Then, to extract meaningful features from the data, Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) are used. We have used, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to develop a Bangla number recognition system. The proposed method recognizes '০-৯৯'(0-99) Bangla spoken numbers with 89.61% accuracy across the entire dataset. The model’s effectiveness was also tested using 10-fold cross-validation, with 89.74% accuracy for recognizing '০-৯৯'(0-99) Bangla spoken numbers across the entire dataset. I Hope, this work will help you in some way. :) submitted by /u/PIASR0Y [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This is a light implementation of the idea in the paper Leveraging Uncertainties in Softmax Decision-Making Models for Low-Power IoT Devices. Instead of finding uncertainties I have added Jain's Fairness Index as a addition to the loss function. Gist: https://gist.github.com/Gananath/8d167384da7d3bc078650c73fab1a8dd submitted by /u/gananath [link] [comments]

Specifically, I'm talking about workshops of major conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc.). If I submit a paper and it gets accepted, is that workshop paper a "final publication"? Or would most people expect the project to continue being developed into a slightly larger/longer paper for submission to the main stream of a conference? And if so, does publishing the earlier workshop paper tend to hinder or harm the later conference submission? I recognise there's a variety of workshops, and perhaps each have different expectations or norms. I'm wondering, from my outsider's perspective, how can I tell? For example, I have been thinking about submitting to one of these ICML workshops: https://icml-compbio.github.io/ or https://www.tagds.com/workshops/tag-in-machine-learning. Is there an easy way to tell whether either or both of these are "final publication" venues or not? submitted by /u/tfburns [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07172 This paper out today seems to make the bold claim that maximum likelihood estimation is not a well-posed training objective in deep generative modelling. The manifold hypothesis says that observed high-dimensional data clusters around low-dimensional manifolds, but maximum likelihood methods (e.g. VAE, normalizing flows) learn high-dimensional densities. The paper argues that the mismatch between dimensionalities will lead to a problem called "manifold overfitting". Models are able to maximize likelihood in high-dimensions by sending the density to infinity around the low-dimensional manifold, but they can do this while completely ignoring the distribution of data on the manifold. So in other words, high capacity models will learn the data manifold…  ( 5 min )

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Any reinforcement learning problem can be modeled as a sequential decision problem (SDP), which can always be modeled as a Markov decision process (need to model the state carefully). An example of an SDP is a multiarmed bandit problem, where the state is the vector of beliefs about the performance of each arm (or beliefs about a continuous parametric model). Decisions are made by a policy, and there are four classes of policies. For some reason, the RL community tends to focus on just one of the four classes (UCB policies, which fall in the class of cost function approximations), but there are entire communities using each of the other three classes. See chapter 7 of my new book (https://castlelab.princeton.edu/RLSO/) for a complete summary of the four classes of policies for pure learning problems (aka bandit problems). Note that Sutton and Barto (2nd edition) cover bandit problems in chapter 2, and then introduce MDPs in chapter 3. A bandit problem *is* an MDP! submitted by /u/powell-sda [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, is it currently possible to train a UAV and implement the policy it in real-life? I understand there are different environments for training, e.g. AirSim, GymFC, and others. However, the interesting part for me is the link to the real world: Is there a way to directly implement any learned policy on a real drone, e.g. a commercially available quad-copter? Which UAV would support such a functionality? I'd love to get started on training drones for RL purposes (search and rescue, etc), but if there is no way to test it in real-life then this would be disappointing. submitted by /u/FrankTheThanks [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am having a hard time figuring out what makes the difference between Expected Sarsa for prediction vs for control. For off-policy Expected Sarsa I believe it's possible to use one epsilon value for a target policy that is epsilon-greedy and another epsilon value for a behaviour policy that is epsilon-greedy. The target policy would be used within the expected value calculation in the update of Q(S,A), the action value function, and the behaviour policy would be used to choose actions from the current state. But I'm not sure how to differentiate between the control version of the algorithm compared to the prediction version though. I think prediction usually finds the state-value function but I know that on-line Sarsa for prediction uses Q(S,A) so I'm not sure how to determine the difference between prediction and control algorithms. submitted by /u/lifelifebalance [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello there, I am working on missile command game, and as a baseline I mostly use rllib/ppo. The algorithm never converges, I suspect it is because of the lack of exploration. Since the timesteps are small, the target usually oscillates around center of the screen, it is impossible to explore to go near the border and then explore to fire (to counter incoming missile). What methods should I try? Moreover, I have already done reward scaling and frame staking. Any suggestions regarding solving this game is much appreciated. Last question, do you now similar (and common) environments that is solved, maybe solutions show the path to follow.Thank you :) submitted by /u/Street_Excitement_14 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I'm reading the ppo paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06347 and I'm confusing about the hyperparameters in table 4, Log stdev. of action distribution | LinearAnneal(-0.7, -1.6). Best to my knowledge, under the continuous setting, the policy will output mean and std, so why the stdev of action distribution is given as a hyperparameter, and also what is LinearAnneal in detail. submitted by /u/StrawberryTemporary7 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I dk how the projection of TZ to match Z work and I also dont understand the formula? can someone do step by step calculation to demo? submitted by /u/Professional_Card176 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hi, this is a very long shot. I have been trying to remember the name of a science TV show which aired in the UK back in the 90's. It focussed on Neural Networks and gave some brilliant examples of environmental sensing. There was also a section showing a simple voice synthesiser which "babbled" like a child. I thought it may have been an "Horizon" show, however, I have been through the list of shows from that time and none appear to be right. If anyone has a memory of this show please let me know. One of the visuals I remember was a plastic skull with an LED matrix inside showing patterns. Obviously this was just some smoke and mirrors, however, it may trigger a memory. I'm trying to recall something from best part of 30 years ago.. submitted by /u/_m0xya_ [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Sponsored Post Unlike traditional online courses, Foster Provost’s workshops will give you the chance to engage live with a world-class […] The post 10 seats remaining | A series of live ML strategy workshops appeared first on Machine Learning Mastery.  ( 2 min )

Posted by Zifeng Wang, Student Researcher, and Zizhao Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Research Supervised learning is a common approach to machine learning (ML) in which the model is trained using data that is labeled appropriately for the task at hand. Ordinary supervised learning trains on independent and identically distributed (IID) data, where all training examples are sampled from a fixed set of classes, and the model has access to these examples throughout the entire training phase. In contrast, continual learning tackles the problem of training a single model on changing data distributions where different classification tasks are presented sequentially. This is particularly important, for example, to enable autonomous agents to process and interpret continuous streams of informati…  ( 7 min )

Conversational interfaces (or chatbots) can provide an intuitive interface for processes such as creating and monitoring tickets. Let’s consider a situation in which a recent hire on your team is required to cut tickets for office equipment. To do so, they have to interact with a ticketing software that the organization uses. This often requires […]  ( 10 min )

Inversion in the unit circle is a way of turning the circle inside-out. Everything that was inside the circle goes outside the circle, and everything that was outside the circle comes in. Not only is the disk turned inside-out, the same thing happens along each ray going out from the origin. Points on that ray […] Inversion in a circle first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 2 min )

Edge computing has come of age, with deployments enabling many applications that process data from IoT sensors and cameras. In 2017, we identified the symbiotic relationship between edge computing and video analytics in an article, noting that live video analytics is the “killer app” for edge computing. Edge devices come in various shapes and sizes […] The post Don’t let data drift derail edge compute machine learning models appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 5 min )

Shared duties have always been the most critical component of every successful organization, regardless of its nature or size. When it…  ( 4 min )

Creating content is no longer tethered to using paint and stone as mediums, nor being in massive studios. Visual art can now be created anywhere, anytime. But being creative is still challenging and time-consuming. NVIDIA is making artistic workflows easier and faster by giving creators tools that enable them to remain in their flow state. Read article > The post Welcome ‘In the NVIDIA Studio’: A Weekly Celebration of Extraordinary Artists, Their Inspiring Art and Innovative Techniques appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 4 min )

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Hello, I'm MB. A very nice and polite guy. Why is it called tensorflow and not matrixflow? AI is all about matrix multiplications, right? So why use the word tensor instead? I know what a tensor is, kind of. But isn't AI about matrix multiplications primarily rather than tensor multiplications. ELI5 please. submitted by /u/MountBlanc [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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I am working on a robotic pet that has lots of movement capability but is simply scripted and will unnaturally jump between movement sets without considering the current movement. What branch of AI should I look into leaning about? Currently I use mostly python for high level and C for microcontrollers. submitted by /u/uMinded [link] [comments]

Hi, I see this question was asked before but I am still not convinced there is a difference between the two. How is asynchronous distributed RL (A3C) and federated learning different? It seems like the basic idea behind them is the same— the agents train in their own environments and only share gradients with the server. Is the difference only in terms of the domain they are applied in? Is it just ML vs RL? submitted by /u/uneasy_daisy [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

In Soft Actor Critic several Q networks are used. Target Q networks are gradually updated to match other Q networks. See step 15 here: https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html#pseudocode I've heard this called polyak averaging. Let's say we have two weights from two neural networks: W1 from one network, and W2 is the corresponding weight from the other network. Polyak averaging averages these weights as follows: W_average = W1 * p + W2 * (1-p) When p is 0.5, it's a evenly weighted average. If p is high, then W1 is weighted more heavily than W2, etc. My question is: Does this method of averaging weights lead to numerically unstable neural networks? This technique is often used to gradually transform one neural network into another on a weight by weight basis, but there is no guarantee that all intermediate neural networks are well behaved (at least, none that I'm aware of). Whereas, gradient descent with small enough step sizes should, theoretically, keep a neural network well behaved, I think those same theoretical guarantees apply to polyak averaging neural networks. What do you think? submitted by /u/Buttons840 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hey all! So I intend to make an application that, very naively speaking, outputs synonyms of a given word regardless of context (like if word1 is "bank", the model should output both "money" and "river", and the order does not matter). For this, I intend to use a Doc2Vec type of classifier, where the meanings of each word can serve as a document, and then similar words can easily be returned using a cosine similarity function. I chose this over a classic Word2Vec as this will be able to predict uncommon words (which blimey the English language has a lot of) which would otherwise be processed as tokens. To this end, I am searching for a suitable dataset. Any ideas? submitted by /u/GrammarPaparazzi [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This is the problem area I am working with: I have a series of videos taken at different times, and each video is paired with a physical variable. The videos contain information that correlates with the physical variable. What we want to do is use the information encoded within each video to build a correlation model with the physical quantity, and thereafter use new videos to predict the physical quantity. (We want to avoid the route of video -> CNN -> extract parameters -> build model with parameters. Instead, we want to directly go from the videos to the model without separately extracting parameters.) So, in a way, I want to use a series of videos as a time series data set. Is there a way to do this? What should be the starting point for my research into this? Thanks in advance! I am not an expert with this area at all, and would greatly appreciate guidance from the community. submitted by /u/besse [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi all! My team recently reproduced and published a PyTorch implementation of the paper SIMONe: View-Invariant, Temporally-Abstracted Object Representations via Unsupervised Video Decomposition. Our blog post walks through the code and provides a detailed explanation of the architecture they use in order to perform object segmentation on videos in a fully self-supervised manner. Hope this is helpful/interesting to others! submitted by /u/ai_ellie [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Both approaches seem to be able to render complex scenes from a single view, without the need for explicit priors or pretrained feature extractors. Conveniently, AutoRF doesn't mention SinNeRF. What are the similarities and differences among the two approaches? DISCLAIMER - I'm not a NeRF expert. My limited understanding of it is that we train a small MLP to regress the radiance field for a scene, i.e., to predict emitted radiance at a point (x,y,z) in the viewing direction (θ, φ). Once we have the radiance field, we can use some rendering engine to render a 2D view from the 3D field and the camera parameters. EDIT: I just realized that I didn't link the papers, how silly of me. Here they are: SinNeRF: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00928 AutoRF: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03593 ​ ​ submitted by /u/Best-Neat-9439 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hey everyone! Our NLP team, led by our expert Daria, has recently released a new AI-based paraphrasing feature – Linguix Paraphraser 2.0. To measure its quality, we use four important metrics: BLEU, Jaccard similarity index, LaBSE and Perplexity. Performance stats: BLEU, which is used for measuring the quality of machine translation. The lower it is for rephrase task, the better. Right now, Linguix Paraphraser 2.0 has the BLEU metric of 0.47 (previous iteration had 0.65). So, we can say that our paraphraser is now smarter, it uses more words to rewrite the sentence, but the overall idea of the content is still preserved. Jaccard similarity index is used to measure the likeness of x and y objects. The same as with BLEU, the lower the index for the task, the better. Our current metric is 0.45 compared to 0.51 for the previous iteration. LaBSE metric is used to measure the semantic similarity of two sentences. It translates text into vectors so that vectors of texts close in meaning are geometrically close to each other. The higher the metric, the better. The new model has LaBSE similarity slightly less than the previous model: 0.80 vs 0.93, which is normal and correct, because the model generates a variety of variants using other words, but keeping the meaning of the source text in the target. Perplexity is used to ensure the rewritten content sounds natural (lower perplexity is better). The naturalness of the rewrites generated by our new paraphraser is much better than before: 0.26 vs 4.99 for the prior version. ​ https://i.redd.it/iaaf7o2iibu81.gif As such, for Linguix Paraphraser 2.0 we were able to improve the quality of the rephrased content, while keeping the text meaning at the same level. P.S. Daria is somewhat shy, so I asked her to share the update here on her behalf. Anyway she'll be pleased to see some feedback! submitted by /u/alexlash [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi all - I'm an applied ML researcher working in an oncology research lab at U Chicago, using digital slides of patient's tumors for tumor classification, prognostication, and treatment response prediction. I'm really excited to share with the community the deep learning tools we've been using, and I'm hoping for any feedback you might have (or direction if you think there's a community or subreddit this might be better suited for). After years of development, we've released our open-source deep learning framework for digital histology, Slideflow (https://github.com/jamesdolezal/slideflow). It has flexible and highly optimized whole-slide image processing, support for a wide variety of existing and custom architectures (with continuous, categorical, or time-series outcomes), real-time digital stain normalization, a number of explainability tools, and integrated uncertainty quantification. It's compatible with both Tensorflow and PyTorch, available on PyPI and DockerHub, and comes with good documentation (https://slideflow.dev/). We've tried out a number of alternative frameworks over the years, and I think the ease of use, flexibility, and performance optimizations set it apart from other repos you'll find on GitHub. We have a handful of local collaborators who are using Slideflow, but I'm hoping to expand our reach and find people in similar fields who are interested in collaborating for ongoing open-source development. I've tried looked for subs relating specifically to computational pathology / digital histology, and haven't found a good community yet - anyone have ideas for how to get connected with like-minded people working in the same field? submitted by /u/shawarma_bees [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

It seems like there have been some options out for a while now - e.g. native pytorch named tensors, tsalib, torchtyping - yet I haven't really seen them discussed or used in any code I've come across. Just wondering if anyone has surveyed them recently and is using them. In particular tsalib's warp string syntax for transformations looks really interesting. submitted by /u/patniemeyer [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

If so, where to buy them? (for example: I red that mythic has been collecting funding in mid-2021, but I dont know if they are for sale anywhere). submitted by /u/GerritTheBerrit [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

FaceNext is an open source PyTorch library for high fidelity 3D face reconstruction from single/multiple RGB image(s). github.com/abdallahdib/NextFace ​ https://reddit.com/link/u6e7cd/video/ixg0wlzirau81/player submitted by /u/Abd_dib [link] [comments]

Hey all, I have received a task in an area I am unfamiliar with and need a little help finding suitable papers, so I am looking for keywords. To illustrate the goal, let's say you have 10000 screws (which can be of the same model) and you want to be able to recognize/match each one. You want new screws to be added all the time, so you also want the case that the object could previously be unknown when performing the match. The goal is to develop a capturing system that produces suitable images and to find an architecture/algorithm that is as robust as possible. The object images should be invariant to illumination, rotation and translation during acquisition. It should be a kind of barcode/hash without any additional symbol, based only on the structure of the object. Is there a name for such a task? I think it is not really a classification in the classical sense. I guess it might be just a clever way of finding suitable features for each individual object structure and suitable distance function. Sorry for the long post, I appreciate any help. submitted by /u/Temporary_Lab769 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello there, Which layer or structure would you append to existing machine learning architectures like yolov5 in order to not only detect the specific object, but also the object which it is part of? Lets say there are xray images of laptops: The laptop itself will be detected and also something like the hard drive or battery inside of it. Is it possible to make the CNN/RNN aware of the fact that the hard drive or battery is inside the Laptop? Hope someone can tell what i mean. Regards David submitted by /u/rohrivibes [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have been offered a PhD in domain of knowledge representation and reasoning for autonomous agents. Goal is to use represent textual rules and world knowledge and then use those represented knowledge for reasoning, so that motion of autonomous agent can be predicted. I have question regarding the current landscape of knowledge representation and reasoning. I see more and more work in data focused model and old Logic and associated paths fading out. Phd project problem itself looks interesting as it focus on work where there will be less need of data and can plan motion in unseen scenarios. But I am concerned about the future career prospective in this domain where this problem is tackled by knowledge representation and reasoning. As I can see there is less and less funding in this domain. What is your take on future landscape of research direction in this domain? submitted by /u/human_treadstone [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

I have published 3 articles about ML model evaluation on my personal blog. Just finished the 3 installment, so I am keen to share and get some feedback. I cover frameworks traditionally used in ML like ROC curves, but from a Bayes decision perspective, which I have been struggling to find in textbooks/tutorials. The 3rd part is about the evaluation of log-likelihood calibrated models. Hope you will find it interesting/useful! https://mkffl.github.io/2021/10/18/Decisions-Part-1.html https://mkffl.github.io/2021/10/28/Decisions-Part-2.html https://mkffl.github.io/2022/03/02/Decisions-Part-3.html And the underlying code for reproducibility https://github.com/mkffl/decisions submitted by /u/mkffl [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

github.com/kleveross/ormb ormb helps you manage your Machine Learning/Deep Learning models with docker container image registry. It makes your models easy to create, version, share and publish. ``` Save the model in local cache first $ ormb save gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 ref: gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 digest: 6b08cd25d01f71a09c1eb852b3a696ee2806abc749628de28a71b507f9eab996 size: 162.1 KiB format: SavedModel v1: saved Push the model from local cache to remote registry $ ormb push gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 The push refers to repository [gaocegege/fashion_model] ref: gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 digest: 6b08cd25d01f71a09c1eb852b3a696ee2806abc749628de28a71b507f9eab996 size: 162.1 KiB format: SavedModel v1: pushed to remote (1 layer, 162.1 KiB total) Pull the model from remote registry to local cache $ ormb pull gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 v1: Pulling from gaocegege/fashion_model ref: gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 digest: 6b08cd25d01f71a09c1eb852b3a696ee2806abc749628de28a71b507f9eab996 size: 162.1 KiB Status: Downloaded newer model for gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 Export the model from local cache to current directory $ ormb export gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 ref: localhost/gaocegege/fashion_model:v1 digest: 6b08cd25d01f71a09c1eb852b3a696ee2806abc749628de28a71b507f9eab996 size: 162.1 KiB View the local file directory $ tree examples/SavedModel-fashion examples/SavedModel-fashion ├── model │ ├── saved_model.pb │ └── variables │ ├── variables.data-00000-of-00001 │ └── variables.index ├── ormbfile.yaml └── training-serving.ipynb 2 directories, 5 files ``` submitted by /u/gaocegege [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi, I have just published my latest medium article. Anomalies are widespread when it comes to working on data. They become vital in time series. So, It is crucial to propose efficient methods to detect and deal with them. This article illustrates a state-of-the-art model called DGHL for anomaly detection. DGHL includes a ConvNet as a Generator and instead of encoding it maximizes the likelihood with the Alternating Back-Propagation algorithms. https://rezayazdanfar.medium.com/deep-generative-model-with-hierarchical-latent-factors-for-time-series-anomaly-detection-8d6eaebad8bc submitted by /u/rezayazdanfar [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

just published “geni”, a new minimal app that uses Latent Diffusion Models. It will not produce DALL-E-ish results but it’s fast and great for playing with prompt engineering. Also, it’s free. would love to have the community playing with it. check it out here: https://geni.vercel.app submitted by /u/viccpopa [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

arXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11556   Summary: We introduce a novel statistical framework for learning a mixture of local normalizing flows as "chart maps" over the data manifold. Our framework augments the expressivity of recent approaches while preserving the signature property of normalizing flows, that they admit exact density evaluation. We learn a suitable atlas of charts for the data manifold via a vector quantized auto-encoder (VQ-AE) and the distributions over them using a conditional flow. We validate experimentally that our probabilistic framework enables existing approaches to better model data distributions over complex manifolds.​   GitHub: Coming Soon Author here, happy to answer any questions. submitted by /u/tshrjn [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/-i-hate-this-place- [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Sponsored Post By Luis Bermudez This blog walks through a process for experimenting with hyperparameters, training algorithms and other parameters […] The post Guide to Iteratively Tuning GNNs appeared first on Machine Learning Mastery.  ( 6 min )

Big data, labeled data, noisy data. Machine learning projects all need to look at data. Data is a critical aspect […] The post Managing Data for Machine Learning Project appeared first on Machine Learning Mastery.  ( 30 min )

7 use-cases where you can make your python code more nifty, concise and elegant — without compromising readability. Continue reading on Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine »  ( 4 min )

Healthcare offers one of the biggest areas where AI could impact people. AI in healthcare is already widespread but is expected to grow even further. The global artificial intelligence in healthcare market size was valued at USD 10.4 billion in 2021. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.4%… Read More »AI and Healthcare: AI as a Triaging Tool for Healthcare The post AI and Healthcare: AI as a Triaging Tool for Healthcare appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 3 min )

In my first blog of the series “Fallacy of Becoming Data-driven – Part 1: Becoming Value-obsessed”, I preached about the critical importance of reframing the conversion away from data-driven to becoming value-obsessed. Instead of focusing on becoming value-driven, organizations need to focus on how to uncover the customer, product, service, and operational insights buried in… Read More »Fallacy of Becoming Data-driven – Part 2: Cultural Transformation The post Fallacy of Becoming Data-driven – Part 2: Cultural Transformation appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 5 min )

As with many fields, knowledge graphs boast a wide array of specialized terms. This guide provides a handy reference to these concepts. Resource Description Framework (RDF) The Resource Description Framework (or RDF) is a conceptual framework established in the early 2000s by the World Wide Web Consortium for describing sets of interrelated assertions. RDF breaks… Read More »A Glossary of Knowledge Graph Terms The post A Glossary of Knowledge Graph Terms appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 10 min )

In this paper, we investigated whether we can 1) detect participants with ataxia-specific gait characteristics (risk-prediction), and 2) assess severity of ataxia from gait (severity-assessment) using computer vision. We created a dataset of 155 videos from 89 participants, 24 controls and 65 diagnosed with (or are pre-manifest) spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs), performing the gait task of the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) from 11 medical sites located in 8 different states across the United States. We develop a computer vision pipeline to detect, track, and separate out the participants from their surroundings and construct several features from their body pose coordinates to capture gait characteristics like step width, step length, swing, stability, speed, etc. Our risk-prediction model achieves 83.06% accuracy and an 80.23% F1 score. Similarly, our severity-assessment model achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) score of 0.6225 and a Pearson's correlation coefficient score of 0.7268. Our models still performed competitively when evaluated on data from sites not used during training. Furthermore, through feature importance analysis, we found that our models associate wider steps, decreased walking speed, and increased instability with greater ataxia severity, which is consistent with previously established clinical knowledge. Our models create possibilities for remote ataxia assessment in non-clinical settings in the future, which could significantly improve accessibility of ataxia care. Furthermore, our underlying dataset was assembled from a geographically diverse cohort, highlighting its potential to further increase equity. The code used in this study is open to the public, and the anonymized body pose landmark dataset is also available upon request.

Though deep generative models have gained a lot of attention, most of the existing works are designed for the unimodal generation task. In this paper, we explore a new method for unconditional image-text pair generation. We propose MXQ-VAE, a vector quantization method for multimodal image-text representation. MXQ-VAE accepts a paired image and text as input, and learns a joint quantized representation space, so that the image-text pair can be converted to a sequence of unified indices. Then we can use autoregressive generative models to model the joint image-text representation, and even perform unconditional image-text pair generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively generates semantically consistent image-text pair and also enhances meaningful alignment between image and text.  ( 2 min )

Online review systems are the primary means through which many businesses seek to build the brand and spread their messages. Prior research studying the effects of online reviews has been mainly focused on a single numerical cause, e.g., ratings or sentiment scores. We argue that such notions of causes entail three key limitations: they solely consider the effects of single numerical causes and ignore different effects of multiple aspects -- e.g., Food, Service -- embedded in the textual reviews; they assume the absence of hidden confounders in observational studies, e.g., consumers' personal preferences; and they overlook the indirect effects of numerical causes that can potentially cancel out the effect of textual reviews on business revenue. We thereby propose an alternative perspective to this single-cause-based effect estimation of online reviews: in the presence of hidden confounders, we consider multi-aspect textual reviews, particularly, their total effects on business revenue and direct effects with the numerical cause -- ratings -- being the mediator. We draw on recent advances in machine learning and causal inference to together estimate the hidden confounders and causal effects. We present empirical evaluations using real-world examples to discuss the importance and implications of differentiating the multi-aspect effects in strategizing business operations.  ( 2 min )

Decreasing projection views to lower X-ray radiation dose usually leads to severe streak artifacts. To improve image quality from sparse-view data, a Multi-domain Integrative Swin Transformer network (MIST-net) was developed in this article. First, MIST-net incorporated lavish domain features from data, residual-data, image, and residual-image using flexible network architectures, where residual-data and residual-image sub-network was considered as data consistency module to eliminate interpolation and reconstruction errors. Second, a trainable edge enhancement filter was incorporated to detect and protect image edges. Third, a high-quality reconstruction Swin transformer (i.e., Recformer) was designed to capture image global features. The experiment results on numerical and real cardiac clinical datasets with 48-views demonstrated that our proposed MIST-net provided better image quality with more small features and sharp edges than other competitors.

Continual learning (CL) aims to develop techniques by which a single model adapts to an increasing number of tasks encountered sequentially, thereby potentially leveraging learnings across tasks in a resource-efficient manner. A major challenge for CL systems is catastrophic forgetting, where earlier tasks are forgotten while learning a new task. To address this, replay-based CL approaches maintain and repeatedly retrain on a small buffer of data selected across encountered tasks. We propose Gradient Coreset Replay (GCR), a novel strategy for replay buffer selection and update using a carefully designed optimization criterion. Specifically, we select and maintain a "coreset" that closely approximates the gradient of all the data seen so far with respect to current model parameters, and discuss key strategies needed for its effective application to the continual learning setting. We show significant gains (2%-4% absolute) over the state-of-the-art in the well-studied offline continual learning setting. Our findings also effectively transfer to online / streaming CL settings, showing upto 5% gains over existing approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the value of supervised contrastive loss for continual learning, which yields a cumulative gain of up to 5% accuracy when combined with our subset selection strategy.

Gradient descent is slow to converge for ill-conditioned problems and non-convex problems. An important technique for acceleration is step-size adaptation. The first part of this paper contains a detailed review of step-size adaptation methods, including Polyak step-size, L4, LossGrad, Adam, IDBD, and Hypergradient descent, and the relation of step-size adaptation to meta-gradient methods. In the second part of this paper, we propose a new class of methods of accelerating gradient descent that have some distinctiveness from existing techniques. The new methods, which we call {\em step-size planning}, use the {\em update experience} to learn an improved way of updating the parameters. The methods organize the experience into $K$ steps away from each other to facilitate planning. From the past experience, our planning algorithm, Csawg, learns a step-size model which is a form of multi-step machine that predicts future updates. We extends Csawg to applying step-size planning multiple steps, which leads to further speedup. We discuss and highlight the projection power of the diagonal-matrix step-size for future large scale applications. We show for a convex problem, our methods can surpass the convergence rate of Nesterov's accelerated gradient, $1 - \sqrt{\mu/L}$, where $\mu, L$ are the strongly convex factor of the loss function $F$ and the Lipschitz constant of $F'$, which is the theoretical limit for the convergence rate of first-order methods. On the well-known non-convex Rosenbrock function, our planning methods achieve zero error below 500 gradient evaluations, while gradient descent takes about 10000 gradient evaluations to reach a $10^{-3}$ accuracy. We discuss the connection of step-size planing to planning in reinforcement learning, in particular, Dyna architectures.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a methodological approach with a transfer learning scheme for plastic waste bottle detection and instance segmentation using the \textit{mask region proposal convolutional neural network} (Mask R-CNN). Plastic bottles constitute one of the major pollutants posing a serious threat to the environment both in oceans and on land. The automated identification and segregation of bottles can facilitate plastic waste recycling. We prepare a custom-made dataset of 192 bottle images with pixel-by pixel-polygon annotation for the automatic segmentation task. The proposed transfer learning scheme makes use of a Mask R-CNN model pre-trained on the Microsoft COCO dataset. We present a comprehensive scheme for fine-tuning the base pre-trained Mask-RCNN model on our custom dataset. Our final fine-tuned model has achieved 59.4 \textit{mean average precision} (mAP), which corresponds to the MS COCO metric. The results indicate a promising application of deep learning for detecting waste bottles.  ( 2 min )

K-means clustering plays a vital role in data mining. However, its performance drastically drops when applied to huge amounts of data. We propose a new heuristic that is built on the basis of regular K-means for faster and more accurate big data clustering using the "less is more" and MSSC decomposition approaches. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it naturally turns the K-means local search into global one through the process of decomposition of the MSSC problem. On one hand, decomposition of the MSSC problem into smaller subproblems reduces the computational complexity and allows for their parallel processing. On the other hand, the MSSC decomposition provides a new method for the natural data-driven shaking of the incumbent solution while introducing a new neighborhood structure for the solution of the MSSC problem. This leads to a new heuristic that improves K-means in big data conditions. The scalability of the algorithm to big data can be easily adjusted by choosing the appropriate number of subproblems and their size. The proposed algorithm is both scalable and accurate. In our experiments it outperforms all recent state-of-the-art algorithms for the MSSC in terms of time as well as the solution quality.  ( 2 min )

Accurately detecting and tracking multi-objects is important for safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation. However, it remains challenging to provide guarantees on the performance of state-of-the-art techniques based on deep learning. We consider a strategy known as conformal prediction, which predicts sets of labels instead of a single label; in the classification and regression settings, these algorithms can guarantee that the true label lies within the prediction set with high probability. Building on these ideas, we propose multi-object detection and tracking algorithms that come with probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantees. They do so by constructing both a prediction set around each object detection as well as around the set of edge transitions; given an object, the detection prediction set contains its true bounding box with high probability, and the edge prediction set contains its true transition across frames with high probability. We empirically demonstrate that our method can detect and track objects with PAC guarantees on the COCO and MOT-17 datasets.

With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, distributed optimization algorithms have attracted significant attention for power systems applications due to their potential for superior scalability, privacy, and robustness to a single point-of-failure. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a popular distributed optimization algorithm; however, its convergence performance is highly dependent on the selection of penalty parameters, which are usually chosen heuristically. In this work, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to develop an adaptive penalty parameter selection policy for the AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) problem solved via ADMM with the goal of minimizing the number of iterations until convergence. We train our RL policy using deep Q-learning, and show that this policy can result in significantly accelerated convergence (up to a 59% reduction in the number of iterations compared to existing, curvature-informed penalty parameter selection methods). Furthermore, we show that our RL policy demonstrates promise for generalizability, performing well under unseen loading schemes as well as under unseen losses of lines and generators (up to a 50% reduction in iterations). This work thus provides a proof-of-concept for using RL for parameter selection in ADMM for power systems applications.

We present the Sequential Aggregation and Rematerialization (SAR) scheme for distributed full-batch training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs. Large-scale training of GNNs has recently been dominated by sampling-based methods and methods based on non-learnable message passing. SAR on the other hand is a distributed technique that can train any GNN type directly on an entire large graph. The key innovation in SAR is the distributed sequential rematerialization scheme which sequentially re-constructs then frees pieces of the prohibitively large GNN computational graph during the backward pass. This results in excellent memory scaling behavior where the memory consumption per worker goes down linearly with the number of workers, even for densely connected graphs. Using SAR, we report the largest applications of full-batch GNN training to-date, and demonstrate large memory savings as the number of workers increases. We also present a general technique based on kernel fusion and attention-matrix rematerialization to optimize both the runtime and memory efficiency of attention-based models. We show that, coupled with SAR, our optimized attention kernels lead to significant speedups and memory savings in attention-based GNNs.We made the SAR GNN training library publicy available: \url{https://github.com/IntelLabs/SAR}.

Question Answering on Electronic Health Records (EHR-QA) has a significant impact on the healthcare domain, and it is being actively studied. Previous research on structured EHR-QA focuses on converting natural language queries into query language such as SQL or SPARQL (NLQ2Query), so the problem scope is limited to pre-defined data types by the specific query language. In order to expand the EHR-QA task beyond this limitation to handle multi-modal medical data and solve complex inference in the future, more primitive systemic language is needed. In this paper, we design the program-based model (NLQ2Program) for EHR-QA as the first step towards the future direction. We tackle MIMICSPARQL*, the graph-based EHR-QA dataset, via a program-based approach in a semi-supervised manner in order to overcome the absence of gold programs. Without the gold program, our proposed model shows comparable performance to the previous state-of-the-art model, which is an NLQ2Query model (0.9% gain). In addition, for a reliable EHR-QA model, we apply the uncertainty decomposition method to measure the ambiguity in the input question. We empirically confirmed data uncertainty is most indicative of the ambiguity in the input question.

Selecting the most suitable algorithm and determining its hyperparameters for a given optimization problem is a challenging task. Accurately predicting how well a certain algorithm could solve the problem is hence desirable. Recent studies in single-objective numerical optimization show that supervised machine learning methods can predict algorithm performance using landscape features extracted from the problem instances. Existing approaches typically treat the algorithms as black-boxes, without consideration of their characteristics. To investigate in this work if a selection of landscape features that depends on algorithms properties could further improve regression accuracy, we regard the modular CMA-ES framework and estimate how much each landscape feature contributes to the best algorithm performance regression models. Exploratory data analysis performed on this data indicate that the set of most relevant features does not depend on the configuration of individual modules, but the influence that these features have on regression accuracy does. In addition, we have shown that by using classifiers that take the features relevance on the model accuracy, we are able to predict the status of individual modules in the CMA-ES configurations.  ( 2 min )

Amounts of historical data collected increase and business intelligence applicability with automatic forecasting of time series are in high demand. While no single time series modeling method is universal to all types of dynamics, forecasting using an ensemble of several methods is often seen as a compromise. Instead of fixing ensemble diversity and size, we propose to predict these aspects adaptively using meta-learning. Meta-learning here considers two separate random forest regression models, built on 390 time-series features, to rank 22 univariate forecasting methods and recommend ensemble size. The forecasting ensemble is consequently formed from methods ranked as the best, and forecasts are pooled using either simple or weighted average (with a weight corresponding to reciprocal rank). The proposed approach was tested on 12561 micro-economic time-series (expanded to 38633 for various forecasting horizons) of M4 competition where meta-learning outperformed Theta and Comb benchmarks by relative forecasting errors for all data types and horizons. Best overall results were achieved by weighted pooling with a symmetric mean absolute percentage error of 9.21% versus 11.05% obtained using the Theta method.  ( 2 min )

Learning accurate classifiers for novel categories from very few examples, known as few-shot image classification, is a challenging task in statistical machine learning and computer vision. The performance in few-shot classification suffers from the bias in the estimation of classifier parameters; however, an effective underlying bias reduction technique that could alleviate this issue in training few-shot classifiers has been overlooked. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Firth bias reduction in few-shot classification. Theoretically, Firth bias reduction removes the $O(N^{-1})$ first order term from the small-sample bias of the Maximum Likelihood Estimator. Here we show that the general Firth bias reduction technique simplifies to encouraging uniform class assignment probabilities for multinomial logistic classification, and almost has the same effect in cosine classifiers. We derive an easy-to-implement optimization objective for Firth penalized multinomial logistic and cosine classifiers, which is equivalent to penalizing the cross-entropy loss with a KL-divergence between the uniform label distribution and the predictions. Then, we empirically evaluate that it is consistently effective across the board for few-shot image classification, regardless of (1) the feature representations from different backbones, (2) the number of samples per class, and (3) the number of classes. Finally, we show the robustness of Firth bias reduction, in the case of imbalanced data distribution. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/ehsansaleh/firth_bias_reduction

While neural architecture search (NAS) has enabled automated machine learning (AutoML) for well-researched areas, its application to tasks beyond computer vision is still under-explored. As less-studied domains are precisely those where we expect AutoML to have the greatest impact, in this work we study NAS for efficiently solving diverse problems. Seeking an approach that is fast, simple, and broadly applicable, we fix a standard convolutional network (CNN) topology and propose to search for the right kernel sizes and dilations its operations should take on. This dramatically expands the model's capacity to extract features at multiple resolutions for different types of data while only requiring search over the operation space. To overcome the efficiency challenges of naive weight-sharing in this search space, we introduce DASH, a differentiable NAS algorithm that computes the mixture-of-operations using the Fourier diagonalization of convolution, achieving both a better asymptotic complexity and an up-to-10x search time speedup in practice. We evaluate DASH on NAS-Bench-360, a suite of ten tasks designed for benchmarking NAS in diverse domains. DASH outperforms state-of-the-art methods in aggregate, attaining the best-known automated performance on seven tasks. Meanwhile, on six of the ten tasks, the combined search and retraining time is less than 2x slower than simply training a CNN backbone that is far less accurate.

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become one of the mainstream structural biology techniques because of its ability to determine high-resolution structures of dynamic bio-molecules. However, cryo-EM data acquisition remains expensive and labor-intensive, requiring substantial expertise. Structural biologists need a more efficient and objective method to collect the best data in a limited time frame. We formulate the cryo-EM data collection task as an optimization problem in this work. The goal is to maximize the total number of good images taken within a specified period. We show that reinforcement learning offers an effective way to plan cryo-EM data collection, successfully navigating heterogenous cryo-EM grids. The approach we developed, cryoRL, demonstrates better performance than average users for data collection under similar settings.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has been extensively studied by the NLP community as a framework for estimating the semantic relation between sentence pairs. While early work identified certain biases in NLI models, recent advancements in modeling and datasets demonstrated promising performance. In this work, we further explore the direct zero-shot applicability of NLI models to real applications, beyond the sentence-pair setting they were trained on. First, we analyze the robustness of these models to longer and out-of-domain inputs. Then, we develop new aggregation methods to allow operating over full documents, reaching state-of-the-art performance on the ContractNLI dataset. Interestingly, we find NLI scores to provide strong retrieval signals, leading to more relevant evidence extractions compared to common similarity-based methods. Finally, we go further and investigate whole document clusters to identify both discrepancies and consensus among sources. In a test case, we find real inconsistencies between Wikipedia pages in different languages about the same topic.  ( 2 min )

Recent advances in diffusion models bring the state-of-the art performance on image generation tasks. However, empirical results on previous research in diffusion models imply that there is an inverse correlation on performances for density estimation and sample generation. This paper analyzes that the inverse correlation arises because density estimation is mostly contributed from small diffusion time, whereas sample generation mainly depends on large diffusion time. However, training score network on both small and large diffusion time is demanding because of the loss imbalance issue. To successfully train the score network on both small and large diffusion time, this paper introduces a training technique, Soft Truncation, that softens the truncation time for every mini-batch update, which is universally applicable to any types of diffusion models. It turns out that Soft Truncation is equivalent to a diffusion model with a general weight, and we prove the variational bound of the general weighted diffusion model. In view of this variational bound, Soft Truncation becomes a natural way to train the score network. In experiments, Soft Truncation achieves the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CelebA, CelebA-HQ $256\times 256$, and STL-10 datasets.  ( 2 min )

A change points detection aims to catch an abrupt disorder in data distribution. Common approaches assume that there are only two fixed distributions for data: one before and another after a change point. Real-world data are richer than this assumption. There can be multiple different distributions before and after a change. We propose an approach that works in the multiple-distributions scenario. Our approach learn representations for semi-structured data suitable for change point detection, while a common classifiers-based approach fails. Moreover, our model is more robust, when predicting change points. The datasets used for benchmarking are sequences of images with and without change points in them.  ( 2 min )

Present-day atomistic simulations generate long trajectories of ever more complex systems. Analyzing these data, discovering metastable states, and uncovering their nature is becoming increasingly challenging. In this paper, we first use the variational approach to conformation dynamics to discover the slowest dynamical modes of the simulations. This allows the different metastable states of the system to be located and organized hierarchically. The physical descriptors that characterize metastable states are discovered by means of a machine learning method. We show in the cases of two proteins, Chignolin and Bovine Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor, how such analysis can be effortlessly performed in a matter of seconds. Another strength of our approach is that it can be applied to the analysis of both unbiased and biased simulations.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning with differential privacy, or private federated learning, provides a strategy to train machine learning models while respecting users' privacy. However, differential privacy can disproportionately degrade the performance of the models on under-represented groups, as these parts of the distribution are difficult to learn in the presence of noise. Existing approaches for enforcing fairness in machine learning models have considered the centralized setting, in which the algorithm has access to the users' data. This paper introduces an algorithm to enforce group fairness in private federated learning, where users' data does not leave their devices. First, the paper extends the modified method of differential multipliers to empirical risk minimization with fairness constraints, thus providing an algorithm to enforce fairness in the central setting. Then, this algorithm is extended to the private federated learning setting. The proposed algorithm, \texttt{FPFL}, is tested on a federated version of the Adult dataset and an "unfair" version of the FEMNIST dataset. The experiments on these datasets show how private federated learning accentuates unfairness in the trained models, and how FPFL is able to mitigate such unfairness.  ( 2 min )

It has long been observed that the performance of evolutionary algorithms and other randomized search heuristics can benefit from a non-static choice of the parameters that steer their optimization behavior. Mechanisms that identify suitable configurations on the fly ("parameter control") or via a dedicated training process ("dynamic algorithm configuration") are therefore an important component of modern evolutionary computation frameworks. Several approaches to address the dynamic parameter setting problem exist, but we barely understand which ones to prefer for which applications. As in classical benchmarking, problem collections with a known ground truth can offer very meaningful insights in this context. Unfortunately, settings with well-understood control policies are very rare. One of the few exceptions for which we know which parameter settings minimize the expected runtime is the LeadingOnes problem. We extend this benchmark by analyzing optimal control policies that can select the parameters only from a given portfolio of possible values. This also allows us to compute optimal parameter portfolios of a given size. We demonstrate the usefulness of our benchmarks by analyzing the behavior of the DDQN reinforcement learning approach for dynamic algorithm configuration.

Contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) encoders have been shown to be beneficial for a range of visual tasks from classification and detection to captioning and image manipulation. We investigate the effectiveness of CLIP visual backbones for Embodied AI tasks. We build incredibly simple baselines, named EmbCLIP, with no task specific architectures, inductive biases (such as the use of semantic maps), auxiliary tasks during training, or depth maps -- yet we find that our improved baselines perform very well across a range of tasks and simulators. EmbCLIP tops the RoboTHOR ObjectNav leaderboard by a huge margin of 20 pts (Success Rate). It tops the iTHOR 1-Phase Rearrangement leaderboard, beating the next best submission, which employs Active Neural Mapping, and more than doubling the % Fixed Strict metric (0.08 to 0.17). It also beats the winners of the 2021 Habitat ObjectNav Challenge, which employ auxiliary tasks, depth maps, and human demonstrations, and those of the 2019 Habitat PointNav Challenge. We evaluate the ability of CLIP's visual representations at capturing semantic information about input observations -- primitives that are useful for navigation-heavy embodied tasks -- and find that CLIP's representations encode these primitives more effectively than ImageNet-pretrained backbones. Finally, we extend one of our baselines, producing an agent capable of zero-shot object navigation that can navigate to objects that were not used as targets during training. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/allenai/embodied-clip  ( 2 min )

Although nanorobots have been used as clinical prescriptions for work such as gastroscopy, and even photoacoustic tomography technology has been proposed to control nanorobots to deliver drugs at designated delivery points in real time, and there are cases of eliminating "superbacteria" in blood through nanorobots, most technologies are immature, either with low efficiency or low accuracy, Either it can not be mass produced, so the most effective way to treat cancer diseases at this stage is through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Patients are suffering and can not be cured. Therefore, this paper proposes an ideal model of a treatment method that can completely cure cancer, a cooperative treatment method based on nano robot queue through team member communication and computer vision image classification (target detection).

We propose a new fast streaming algorithm for the tensor completion problem of imputing missing entries of a low-tubal-rank tensor using the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) algebraic framework. We show the t-SVD is a specialization of the well-studied block-term decomposition for third-order tensors, and we present an algorithm under this model that can track changing free submodules from incomplete streaming 2-D data. The proposed algorithm uses principles from incremental gradient descent on the Grassmann manifold of subspaces to solve the tensor completion problem with linear complexity and constant memory in the number of time samples. We provide a local expected linear convergence result for our algorithm. Our empirical results are competitive in accuracy but much faster in compute time than state-of-the-art tensor completion algorithms on real applications to recover temporal chemo-sensing and MRI data under limited sampling.

This paper is devoted to a practical method for ferroalloys consumption modeling and optimization. We consider the problem of selecting the optimal process control parameters based on the analysis of historical data from sensors. We developed approach, which predicts results of chemical reactions and give ferroalloys consumption recommendation. The main features of our method are easy interpretation and noise resistance. Our approach is based on k-means clustering algorithm, decision trees and linear regression. The main idea of the method is to identify situations where processes go similarly. For this, we propose using a k-means based dataset clustering algorithm and a classification algorithm to determine the cluster. This algorithm can be also applied to various technological processes, in this article, we demonstrate its application in metallurgy. To test the application of the proposed method, we used it to optimize ferroalloys consumption in Basic Oxygen Furnace steelmaking when finishing steel in a ladle furnace. The minimum required element content for a given steel grade was selected as the predictive model's target variable, and the required amount of the element to be added to the melt as the optimized variable. Keywords: Clustering, Machine Learning, Linear Regression, Steelmaking, Optimization, Gradient Boosting, Artificial Intelligence, Decision Trees, Recommendation services

We provide a new analysis of local SGD, removing unnecessary assumptions and elaborating on the difference between two data regimes: identical and heterogeneous. In both cases, we improve the existing theory and provide values of the optimal stepsize and optimal number of local iterations. Our bounds are based on a new notion of variance that is specific to local SGD methods with different data. The tightness of our results is guaranteed by recovering known statements when we plug $H=1$, where $H$ is the number of local steps. The empirical evidence further validates the severe impact of data heterogeneity on the performance of local SGD.

We study the problem of user segmentation: given a set of users and one or more predefined groups or segments, assign users to their corresponding segments. As an example, for a segment indicating particular interest in a certain area of sports or entertainment, the task will be to predict whether each single user will belong to the segment. However, there may exist numerous long tail prediction tasks that suffer from data availability and may be of heterogeneous nature, which make it hard to capture using single off the shelf model architectures. In this work, we present SuperCone, our unified predicative segments system that addresses the above challenges. It builds on top of a flat concept representation that summarizes each user's heterogeneous digital footprints, and uniformly models each of the prediction task using an approach called "super learning ", that is, combining prediction models with diverse architectures or learning method that are not compatible with each other. Following this, we provide an end to end approach that learns to flexibly attend to best suited heterogeneous experts adaptively, while at the same time incorporating deep representations of the input concepts that augments the above experts. Experiments show that SuperCone significantly outperform state-of-the-art recommendation and ranking algorithms on a wide range of predicative segment tasks and public structured data learning benchmarks.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and environment models are unknown. To justify widespread deployment, robots must respect safety constraints without sacrificing performance. Thus, we propose a Black-box Reachability-based Safety Layer (BRSL) with three main components: (1) data-driven reachability analysis for a black-box robot model, (2) a trajectory rollout planner that predicts future actions and observations using an ensemble of neural networks trained online, and (3) a differentiable polytope collision check between the reachable set and obstacles that enables correcting unsafe actions. In simulation, BRSL outperforms other state-of-the-art safe RL methods on a Turtlebot 3, a quadrotor, and a trajectory-tracking point mass with an unsafe set adjacent to the area of highest reward.

Autoencoder-based deep learning is applied to jointly optimize geometric and probabilistic constellation shaping for optical coherent communication. The optimized constellation shaping outperforms the 256 QAM Maxwell-Boltzmann probabilistic distribution with extra 0.05 bits/4D-symbol mutual information for 64 GBd transmission over 170 km SMF link.

Recently, the use of machine learning in meteorology has increased greatly. While many machine learning methods are not new, university classes on machine learning are largely unavailable to meteorology students and are not required to become a meteorologist. The lack of formal instruction has contributed to perception that machine learning methods are 'black boxes' and thus end-users are hesitant to apply the machine learning methods in their every day workflow. To reduce the opaqueness of machine learning methods and lower hesitancy towards machine learning in meteorology, this paper provides a survey of some of the most common machine learning methods. A familiar meteorological example is used to contextualize the machine learning methods while also discussing machine learning topics using plain language. The following machine learning methods are demonstrated: linear regression; logistic regression; decision trees; random forest; gradient boosted decision trees; naive Bayes; and support vector machines. Beyond discussing the different methods, the paper also contains discussions on the general machine learning process as well as best practices to enable readers to apply machine learning to their own datasets. Furthermore, all code (in the form of Jupyter notebooks and Google Colaboratory notebooks) used to make the examples in the paper is provided in an effort to catalyse the use of machine learning in meteorology.

Latent Gaussian models and boosting are widely used techniques in statistics and machine learning. Tree-boosting shows excellent prediction accuracy on many data sets, but potential drawbacks are that it assumes conditional independence of samples, produces discontinuous predictions for, e.g., spatial data, and it can have difficulty with high-cardinality categorical variables. Latent Gaussian models, such as Gaussian process and grouped random effects models, are flexible prior models which explicitly model dependence among samples and which allow for efficient learning of predictor functions and for making probabilistic predictions. However, existing latent Gaussian models usually assume either a zero or a linear prior mean function which can be an unrealistic assumption. This article introduces a novel approach that combines boosting and latent Gaussian models to remedy the above-mentioned drawbacks and to leverage the advantages of both techniques. We obtain increased prediction accuracy compared to existing approaches in both simulated and real-world data experiments.

We propose a new design of a neural network for solving a zero shot super resolution problem for turbulent flows. We embed Luenberger-type observer into the network's architecture to inform the network of the physics of the process, and to provide error correction and stabilization mechanisms. In addition, to compensate for decrease of observer's performance due to the presence of unknown destabilizing forcing, the network is designed to estimate the contribution of the unknown forcing implicitly from the data over the course of training. By running a set of numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed network does recover unknown forcing from data and is capable of predicting turbulent flows in high resolution from low resolution noisy observations.  ( 2 min )

We introduce a general approach, called Invariance through Inference, for improving the test-time performance of an agent in deployment environments with unknown perceptual variations. Instead of producing invariant visual features through interpolation, invariance through inference turns adaptation at deployment-time into an unsupervised learning problem. This is achieved in practice by deploying a straightforward algorithm that tries to match the distribution of latent features to the agent's prior experience, without relying on paired data. Although simple, we show that this idea leads to surprising improvements on a variety of adaptation scenarios without access to deployment-time rewards, including changes in scene content, camera poses, and lighting conditions. We present results on challenging domains including distractor control suite and sim-to-real transfer for image-based robot manipulation.

Backdoor attacks insert malicious data into a training set so that, during inference time, it misclassifies inputs that have been patched with a backdoor trigger as the malware specified label. For backdoor attacks to bypass human inspection, it is essential that the injected data appear to be correctly labeled. The attacks with such property are often referred to as "clean-label attacks." Existing clean-label backdoor attacks require knowledge of the entire training set to be effective. Obtaining such knowledge is difficult or impossible because training data are often gathered from multiple sources (e.g., face images from different users). It remains a question whether backdoor attacks still present a real threat. This paper provides an affirmative answer to this question by designing an algorithm to mount clean-label backdoor attacks based only on the knowledge of representative examples from the target class. With poisoning equal to or less than 0.5% of the target-class data and 0.05% of the training set, we can train a model to classify test examples from arbitrary classes into the target class when the examples are patched with a backdoor trigger. Our attack works well across datasets and models, even when the trigger presents in the physical world. We explore the space of defenses and find that, surprisingly, our attack can evade the latest state-of-the-art defenses in their vanilla form, or after a simple twist, we can adapt to the downstream defenses. We study the cause of the intriguing effectiveness and find that because the trigger synthesized by our attack contains features as persistent as the original semantic features of the target class, any attempt to remove such triggers would inevitably hurt the model accuracy first.

Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.

Machine Learning has been applied to pathology images in research and clinical practice with promising outcomes. However, standard ML models often lack the rigorous evaluation required for clinical decisions. Machine learning techniques for natural images are ill-equipped to deal with pathology images that are significantly large and noisy, require expensive labeling, are hard to interpret, and are susceptible to spurious correlations. We propose a set of practical guidelines for ML evaluation in pathology that address the above concerns. The paper includes measures for setting up the evaluation framework, effectively dealing with variability in labels, and a recommended suite of tests to address issues related to domain shift, robustness, and confounding variables. We hope that the proposed framework will bridge the gap between ML researchers and domain experts, leading to wider adoption of ML techniques in pathology and improving patient outcomes.

Remarkable progress has been achieved in synthesizing photo-realistic images with generative adversarial neural networks (GANs). Recently, GANs are utilized as the training sample generator when obtaining or storing real training data is expensive even infeasible. However, traditional GANs generated images are not as informative as the real training samples when being used to train deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method to synthesize Informative Training samples with GAN (IT-GAN). Specifically, we freeze a pre-trained GAN model and learn the informative latent vectors that corresponds to informative training samples. The synthesized images are required to preserve information for training deep neural networks rather than visual reality or fidelity. Experiments verify that the deep neural networks can learn faster and achieve better performance when being trained with our IT-GAN generated images. We also show that our method is a promising solution to dataset condensation problem.

We propose a streaming non-autoregressive (non-AR) decoding algorithm to deliberate the hypothesis alignment of a streaming RNN-T model. Our algorithm facilitates a simple greedy decoding procedure, and at the same time is capable of producing the decoding result at each frame with limited right context, thus enjoying both high efficiency and low latency. These advantages are achieved by converting the offline Align-Refine algorithm to be streaming-compatible, with a novel transformer decoder architecture that performs local self-attentions for both text and audio, and a time-aligned cross-attention at each layer. Furthermore, we perform discriminative training of our model with the minimum word error rate (MWER) criterion, which has not been done in the non-AR decoding literature. Experiments on voice search datasets and Librispeech show that with reasonable right context, our streaming model performs as well as the offline counterpart, and discriminative training leads to further WER gain when the first-pass model has small capacity.

We develop methods for reducing the dimensionality of large data sets, common in biomedical applications. Learning about patients using genetic data often includes more features than observations, which makes direct supervised learning difficult. One method of reducing the feature space is to use latent Dirichlet allocation to group genetic variants in an unsupervised manner. Latent Dirichlet allocation describes a patient as a mixture of topics corresponding to genetic variants. This can be generalized as a Bayesian tensor decomposition to account for multiple feature variables. Our most significant contributions are with hierarchical topic modeling. We design distinct methods of incorporating hierarchical topic modeling, based on nested Chinese restaurant processes and Pachinko Allocation Machine, into Bayesian tensor decomposition. We apply these models to examine patients with one of four common types of cancer (breast, lung, prostate, and colorectal) and siblings with and without autism spectrum disorder. We linked the genes with their biological pathways and combine this information into a tensor of patients, counts of their genetic variants, and the genes' membership in pathways. We find that our trained models outperform baseline models, with respect to coherence, by up to 40%.

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the distance of nearest neighbors in the low dimensional representational space to gauge novelty. We then leverage these intrinsic rewards for sample-efficient exploration with planning routines in representational space for hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards. One key element of our approach is the use of information theoretic principles to shape our representations in a way so that our novelty reward goes beyond pixel similarity. We test our approach on a number of maze tasks, as well as a control problem and show that our exploration approach is more sample-efficient compared to strong baselines.

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for reducing the memory footprint and compute costs of deep neural networks. BNNs, on the other hand, suffer from information loss because binary activations are limited to only two values, resulting in reduced accuracy. To improve the accuracy, previous studies have attempted to control the distribution of binary activation by manually shifting the threshold of the activation function or making the shift amount trainable. During the process, they usually depended on statistical information computed from a batch. We argue that using statistical data from a batch fails to capture the crucial information for each input instance in BNN computations, and the differences between statistical information computed from each instance need to be considered when determining the binary activation threshold of each instance. Based on the concept, we propose the Binary Neural Network with INSTAnce-aware threshold (INSTA-BNN), which decides the activation threshold value considering the difference between statistical data computed from a batch and each instance. The proposed INSTA-BNN outperforms the baseline by 2.5% and 2.3% on the ImageNet classification task with comparable computing cost, achieving 68.0% and 71.7% top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 and MobileNetV1 based models, respectively.

This paper studies node classification in the inductive setting, i.e., aiming to learn a model on labeled training graphs and generalize it to infer node labels on unlabeled test graphs. This problem has been extensively studied with graph neural networks (GNNs) by learning effective node representations, as well as traditional structured prediction methods for modeling the structured output of node labels, e.g., conditional random fields (CRFs). In this paper, we present a new approach called the Structured Proxy Network (SPN), which combines the advantages of both worlds. SPN defines flexible potential functions of CRFs with GNNs. However, learning such a model is nontrivial as it involves optimizing a maximin game with high-cost inference. Inspired by the underlying connection between joint and marginal distributions defined by Markov networks, we propose to solve an approximate version of the optimization problem as a proxy, which yields a near-optimal solution, making learning more efficient. Extensive experiments on two settings show that our approach outperforms many competitive baselines.

Substantial efforts have been applied to engineer CA with desired emergent properties, such as supporting gliders. Recent work in continuous CA has generated a wide variety of compelling bioreminescent patterns, and the expansion of CA research into continuous numbers, multiple channels, and higher dimensions complicates their study. In this work we devise a strategy for evolving CA and CA patterns in two steps, based on the simple idea that CA are likely to be complex and computationally capable if they support patterns that grow indefinitely as well as patterns that vanish completely, and are difficult to predict the difference in advance. The second part of our strategy evolves patterns by selecting for mobility and conservation of mean cell value. We validate our pattern evolution method by re-discovering gliders in 17 of 17 Lenia CA, and also report 5 new evolved CA that support evolved glider patterns, differing from previously reported Lenia patterns. The CA reported here share neighborhood kernels with previously described Lenia CA, but exhibit a wider range of typical dynamics than their Lenia counterparts. Code for evolving continuous CA is made available under an MIT License.

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is a candidate non-orthonormal transmission technique to improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of future communication systems. However, such improvements of the SE are at the cost of additional computational complexity to remove the intentionally introduced intersymbol interference. In this paper, we investigate the use of deep learning (DL) to reduce the detection complexity of FTN signaling. To eliminate the need of having a noise whitening filter at the receiver, we first present an equivalent FTN signaling model based on using a set of orthonormal basis functions and identify its operation region. Second, we propose a DL-based list sphere decoding (DL-LSD) algorithm that selects and updates the initial radius of the original LSD to guarantee a pre-defined number $N_{\text{L}}$ of lattice points inside the hypersphere. This is achieved by training a neural network to output an approximate initial radius that includes $N_{\text{L}}$ lattice points. At the testing phase, if the hypersphere has more than $N_{\text{L}}$ lattice points, we keep the $N_{\text{L}}$ closest points to the point corresponding to the received FTN signal; however, if the hypersphere has less than $N_{\text{L}}$ points, we increase the approximate initial radius by a value that depends on the standard deviation of the distribution of the output radii from the training phase. Then, the approximate value of the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) is calculated based on the obtained $N_{\text{L}}$ points. Simulation results show that the computational complexity of the proposed DL-LSD is lower than its counterpart of the original LSD by orders of magnitude.

The absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) properties are important in drug discovery as they define efficacy and safety. Here, we apply an ensemble of features, including fingerprints and descriptors, and a tree-based machine learning model, extreme gradient boosting, for accurate ADMET prediction. Our model performs well in the Therapeutics Data Commons ADMET benchmark group. For 22 tasks, our model is ranked first in 10 tasks and top 3 in 18 tasks.  ( 2 min )

In typical multi-talker speech recognition systems, a neural network-based acoustic model predicts senone state posteriors for each speaker. These are later used by a single-talker decoder which is applied on each speaker-specific output stream separately. In this work, we argue that such a scheme is sub-optimal and propose a principled solution that decodes all speakers jointly. We modify the acoustic model to predict joint state posteriors for all speakers, enabling the network to express uncertainty about the attribution of parts of the speech signal to the speakers. We employ a joint decoder that can make use of this uncertainty together with higher-level language information. For this, we revisit decoding algorithms used in factorial generative models in early multi-talker speech recognition systems. In contrast with these early works, we replace the GMM acoustic model with DNN, which provides greater modeling power and simplifies part of the inference. We demonstrate the advantage of joint decoding in proof of concept experiments on a mixed-TIDIGITS dataset.

Compressing deep neural networks while maintaining accuracy is important when we want to deploy large, powerful models in production and/or edge devices. One common technique used to achieve this goal is knowledge distillation. Typically, the output of a static pre-defined teacher (a large base network) is used as soft labels to train and transfer information to a student (or smaller) network. In this paper, we introduce Adjoined Networks, or AN, a learning paradigm that trains both the original base network and the smaller compressed network together. In our training approach, the parameters of the smaller network are shared across both the base and the compressed networks. Using our training paradigm, we can simultaneously compress (the student network) and regularize (the teacher network) any architecture. In this paper, we focus on popular CNN-based architectures used for computer vision tasks. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation of our training paradigm on various large-scale datasets. Using ResNet-50 as the base network, AN achieves 71.8% top-1 accuracy with only 1.8M parameters and 1.6 GFLOPs on the ImageNet data-set. We further propose Differentiable Adjoined Networks (DAN), a training paradigm that augments AN by using neural architecture search to jointly learn both the width and the weights for each layer of the smaller network. DAN achieves ResNet-50 level accuracy on ImageNet with $3.8\times$ fewer parameters and $2.2\times$ fewer FLOPs.  ( 2 min )

Music Structure Analysis (MSA) consists in segmenting a music piece in several distinct sections. We approach MSA within a compression framework, under the hypothesis that the structure is more easily revealed by a simplified representation of the original content of the song. More specifically, under the hypothesis that MSA is correlated with similarities occurring at the bar scale, this article introduces the use of linear and non-linear compression schemes on barwise audio signals. Compressed representations capture the most salient components of the different bars in the song and are then used to infer the song structure using a dynamic programming algorithm. This work explores both low-rank approximation models such as Principal Component Analysis or Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and "piece-specific" Auto-Encoding Neural Networks, with the objective to learn latent representations specific to a given song. Such approaches do not rely on supervision nor annotations, which are well-known to be tedious to collect and possibly ambiguous in MSA description. In our experiments, several unsupervised compression schemes achieve a level of performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art supervised methods (for 3s tolerance) on the RWC-Pop dataset, showcasing the importance of the barwise compression processing for MSA.  ( 2 min )

The success of deep learning has sparked interest in improving relational table tasks, like data preparation and search, with table representation models trained on large table corpora. Existing table corpora primarily contain tables extracted from HTML pages, limiting the capability to represent offline database tables. To train and evaluate high-capacity models for applications beyond the Web, we need resources with tables that resemble relational database tables. Here we introduce GitTables, a corpus of 1M relational tables extracted from GitHub. Our continuing curation aims at growing the corpus to at least 10M tables. Analyses of GitTables show that its structure, content, and topical coverage differ significantly from existing table corpora. We annotate table columns in GitTables with semantic types, hierarchical relations and descriptions from Schema.org and DBpedia. The evaluation of our annotation pipeline on the T2Dv2 benchmark illustrates that our approach provides results on par with human annotations. We present three applications of GitTables, demonstrating its value for learned semantic type detection models, schema completion methods, and benchmarks for table-to-KG matching, data search, and preparation. We make the corpus and code available at https://gittables.github.io.  ( 2 min )

Integer programs provide a powerful abstraction for representing a wide range of real-world scheduling problems. Despite their ability to model general scheduling problems, solving large-scale integer programs (IP) remains a computational challenge in practice. The incorporation of more complex objectives such as robustness to disruptions further exacerbates the computational challenge. We present NICE (Neural network IP Coefficient Extraction), a novel technique that combines reinforcement learning and integer programming to tackle the problem of robust scheduling. More specifically, NICE uses reinforcement learning to approximately represent complex objectives in an integer programming formulation. We use NICE to determine assignments of pilots to a flight crew schedule so as to reduce the impact of disruptions. We compare NICE with (1) a baseline integer programming formulation that produces a feasible crew schedule, and (2) a robust integer programming formulation that explicitly tries to minimize the impact of disruptions. Our experiments show that, across a variety of scenarios, NICE produces schedules resulting in 33% to 48% fewer disruptions than the baseline formulation. Moreover, in more severely constrained scheduling scenarios in which the robust integer program fails to produce a schedule within 90 minutes, NICE is able to build robust schedules in less than 2 seconds on average.  ( 2 min )

Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of performant policies that are diverse with respect to quantified behavior. Recent work shows that differentiable quality diversity (DQD) algorithms greatly accelerate QD optimization when exact gradients are available. However, agent policies typically assume that the environment is not differentiable. To apply DQD algorithms to training agent policies, we must approximate gradients for performance and behavior. We propose two variants of the current state-of-the-art DQD algorithm that compute gradients via approximation methods common in reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluate our approach on four simulated locomotion tasks. One variant achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in combining QD and RL, while the other performs comparably in two locomotion tasks. These results provide insight into the limitations of current DQD algorithms in domains where gradients must be approximated. Source code is available at https://github.com/icaros-usc/dqd-rl

Invertible neural networks (INNs) are neural network architectures with invertibility by design. Thanks to their invertibility and the tractability of Jacobian, INNs have various machine learning applications such as probabilistic modeling, generative modeling, and representation learning. However, their attractive properties often come at the cost of restricting the layer designs, which poses a question on their representation power: can we use these models to approximate sufficiently diverse functions? To answer this question, we have developed a general theoretical framework to investigate the representation power of INNs, building on a structure theorem of differential geometry. The framework simplifies the approximation problem of diffeomorphisms, which enables us to show the universal approximation properties of INNs. We apply the framework to two representative classes of INNs, namely Coupling-Flow-based INNs (CF-INNs) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), and elucidate their high representation power despite the restrictions on their architectures.

Message-Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), the most prominent Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework, celebrate much success in the analysis of graph-structured data. Concurrently, the sparsification of Neural Network models attracts a great amount of academic and industrial interest. In this paper we conduct a structured, empirical study of the effect of sparsification on the trainable part of MPNNs known as the Update step. To this end, we design a series of models to successively sparsify the linear transform in the Update step. Specifically, we propose the ExpanderGNN model with a tuneable sparsification rate and the Activation-Only GNN, which has no linear transform in the Update step. In agreement with a growing trend in the literature the sparsification paradigm is changed by initialising sparse neural network architectures rather than expensively sparsifying already trained architectures. Our novel benchmark models enable a better understanding of the influence of the Update step on model performance and outperform existing simplified benchmark models such as the Simple Graph Convolution. The ExpanderGNNs, and in some cases the Activation-Only models, achieve performance on par with their vanilla counterparts on several downstream tasks, while containing significantly fewer trainable parameters. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ChangminWu/ExpanderGNN.

In step with the digitalization of transportation, we are witnessing a growing range of path-based smart-city applications, e.g., travel-time estimation and travel path ranking. A temporal path(TP) that includes temporal information, e.g., departure time, into the path is fundamental to enable such applications. In this setting, it is essential to learn generic temporal path representations(TPRs) that consider spatial and temporal correlations simultaneously and that can be used in different applications, i.e., downstream tasks. Existing methods fail to achieve the goal since (i) supervised methods require large amounts of task-specific labels when training and thus fail to generalize the obtained TPRs to other tasks; (ii) through unsupervised methods can learn generic representations, they disregard the temporal aspect, leading to sub-optimal results. To contend with the limitations of existing solutions, we propose a Weakly-Supervised Contrastive (WSC) learning model. We first propose a temporal path encoder that encodes both the spatial and temporal information of a temporal path into a TPR. To train the encoder, we introduce weak labels that are easy and inexpensive to obtain and are relevant to different tasks, e.g., temporal labels indicating peak vs. off-peak hours from departure times. Based on the weak labels, we construct meaningful positive and negative temporal path samples by considering both spatial and temporal information, which facilities training the encoder using contrastive learning by pulling closer to the positive samples' representations while pushing away the negative samples' representations. To better guide contrastive learning, we propose a learning strategy based on Curriculum Learning such that the learning performs from easy to hard training instances. Experiments studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In data-rich domains such as vision, language, and speech, deep learning prevails to deliver high-performance task-specific models and can even learn general task-agnostic representations for efficient finetuning to downstream tasks. However, deep learning in resource-limited domains still faces the following challenges including (i) limited data, (ii) constrained model development cost, and (iii) lack of adequate pre-trained models for effective finetuning. This paper introduces a new technique called model reprogramming to bridge this gap. Model reprogramming enables resource-efficient cross-domain machine learning by repurposing and reusing a well-developed pre-trained model from a source domain to solve tasks in a target domain without model finetuning, where the source and target domains can be vastly different. In many applications, model reprogramming outperforms transfer learning and training from scratch. This paper elucidates the methodology of model reprogramming, summarizes existing use cases, provides a theoretical explanation on the success of model reprogramming, and concludes with a discussion on open-ended research questions and opportunities. A list of model reprogramming studies is actively maintained and updated at https://github.com/IBM/model-reprogramming.  ( 2 min )

Tensor PCA is a stylized statistical inference problem introduced by Montanari and Richard to study the computational difficulty of estimating an unknown parameter from higher-order moment tensors. Unlike its matrix counterpart, Tensor PCA exhibits a statistical-computational gap, i.e., a sample size regime where the problem is information-theoretically solvable but conjectured to be computationally hard. This paper derives computational lower bounds on the run-time of memory bounded algorithms for Tensor PCA using communication complexity. These lower bounds specify a trade-off among the number of passes through the data sample, the sample size, and the memory required by any algorithm that successfully solves Tensor PCA. While the lower bounds do not rule out polynomial-time algorithms, they do imply that many commonly-used algorithms, such as gradient descent and power method, must have a higher iteration count when the sample size is not large enough. Similar lower bounds are obtained for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis, a family of statistical estimation problems in which low-order moment tensors carry no information about the unknown parameter. Finally, stronger lower bounds are obtained for an asymmetric variant of Tensor PCA and related statistical estimation problems. These results explain why many estimators for these problems use a memory state that is significantly larger than the effective dimensionality of the parameter of interest.

The fruits of science are relationships made comprehensible, often by way of approximation. While deep learning is an extremely powerful way to find relationships in data, its use in science has been hindered by the difficulty of understanding the learned relationships. The Information Bottleneck (IB) is an information theoretic framework for understanding a relationship between an input and an output in terms of a trade-off between the fidelity and complexity of approximations to the relationship. Here we show that a crucial modification -- distributing bottlenecks across multiple components of the input -- opens fundamentally new avenues for interpretable deep learning in science. The Distributed Information Bottleneck throttles the downstream complexity of interactions between the components of the input, deconstructing a relationship into meaningful approximations found through deep learning without requiring custom-made datasets or neural network architectures. Applied to a complex system, the approximations illuminate aspects of the system's nature by restricting -- and monitoring -- the information about different components incorporated into the approximation. We demonstrate the Distributed IB's explanatory utility in systems drawn from applied mathematics and condensed matter physics. In the former, we deconstruct a Boolean circuit into approximations that isolate the most informative subsets of input components without requiring exhaustive search. In the latter, we localize information about future plastic rearrangement in the static structure of a sheared glass, and find the information to be more or less diffuse depending on the system's preparation. By way of a principled scheme of approximations, the Distributed IB brings much-needed interpretability to deep learning and enables unprecedented analysis of information flow through a system.

The Monge-Amp\`ere equation is a fully nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) of fundamental importance in analysis, geometry and in the applied sciences. In this paper we solve the Dirichlet problem associated with the Monge-Amp\`ere equation using neural networks and we show that an ansatz using deep input convex neural networks can be used to find the unique convex solution. As part of our analysis we study the effect of singularities, discontinuities and noise in the source function, we consider nontrivial domains, and we investigate how the method performs in higher dimensions. We also compare this method to an alternative approach in which standard feed-forward networks are used together with a loss function which penalizes lack of convexity.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are composed of layers consisting of graph convolutions and pointwise nonlinearities. Due to their invariance and stability properties, GNNs are provably successful at learning representations from data supported on moderate-scale graphs. However, they are difficult to learn on large-scale graphs. In this paper, we study the problem of training GNNs on graphs of moderate size and transferring them to large-scale graphs. We use graph limits called graphons to define limit objects for graph filters and GNNs -- graphon filters and graphon neural networks (WNNs) -- which we interpret as generative models for graph filters and GNNs. We then show that graphon filters and WNNs can be approximated by graph filters and GNNs sampled from them on weighted and stochastic graphs. Because the error of these approximations can be upper bounded, by a triangle inequality argument we can further bound the error of transferring a graph filter or a GNN across graphs. Our results show that (i) the transference error decreases with the graph size, and (ii) that graph filters have a transferability-discriminability tradeoff that in GNNs is alleviated by the scattering behavior of the nonlinearity. These findings are demonstrated empirically in a movie recommendation problem and in a decentralized control task.

Recent works have derived neural networks with online correlation-based learning rules to perform \textit{kernel similarity matching}. These works applied existing linear similarity matching algorithms to nonlinear features generated with random Fourier methods. In this paper attempt to perform kernel similarity matching by directly learning the nonlinear features. Our algorithm proceeds by deriving and then minimizing an upper bound for the sum of squared errors between output and input kernel similarities. The construction of our upper bound leads to online correlation-based learning rules which can be implemented with a 1 layer recurrent neural network. In addition to generating high-dimensional linearly separable representations, we show that our upper bound naturally yields representations which are sparse and selective for specific input patterns. We compare the approximation quality of our method to neural random Fourier method and variants of the popular but non-biological "Nystr{\"o}m" method for approximating the kernel matrix. Our method appears to be comparable or better than randomly sampled Nystr{\"o}m methods when the outputs are relatively low dimensional (although still potentially higher dimensional than the inputs) but less faithful when the outputs are very high dimensional.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is challenging to use in practice due to the inter/intra-subject variability of electroencephalography (EEG). The BCI system, in general, necessitates a calibration technique to obtain subject/session-specific data in order to tune the model each time the system is utilized. This issue is acknowledged as a key hindrance to BCI, and a new strategy based on domain generalization has recently evolved to address it. In light of this, we've concentrated on developing an EEG classification framework that can be applied directly to data from unknown domains (i.e. subjects), using only data acquired from separate subjects previously. For this purpose, in this paper, we proposed a framework that employs the open-set recognition technique as an auxiliary task to learn subject-specific style features from the source dataset while helping the shared feature extractor with mapping the features of the unseen target dataset as a new unseen domain. Our aim is to impose cross-instance style in-variance in the same domain and reduce the open space risk on the potential unseen subject in order to improve the generalization ability of the shared feature extractor. Our experiments showed that using the domain information as an auxiliary network increases the generalization performance.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we present a novel sensitivity-based filter pruning algorithm (SbF-Pruner) to learn the importance scores of filters of each layer end-to-end. Our method learns the scores from the filter weights, enabling it to account for the correlations between the filters of each layer. Moreover, by training the pruning scores of all layers simultaneously our method can account for layer interdependencies, which is essential to find a performant sparse sub-network. Our proposed method can train and generate a pruned network from scratch in a straightforward, one-stage training process without requiring a pretrained network. Ultimately, we do not need layer-specific hyperparameters and pre-defined layer budgets, since SbF-Pruner can implicitly determine the appropriate number of channels in each layer. Our experimental results on different network architectures suggest that SbF-Pruner outperforms advanced pruning methods. Notably, on CIFAR-10, without requiring a pretrained baseline network, we obtain 1.02% and 1.19% accuracy gain on ResNet56 and ResNet110, compared to the baseline reported for state-of-the-art pruning algorithms. This is while SbF-Pruner reduces parameter-count by 52.3% (for ResNet56) and 54% (for ResNet101), which is better than the state-of-the-art pruning algorithms with a high margin of 9.5% and 6.6%.  ( 2 min )

Email is one of the most widely used ways to communicate, with millions of people and businesses relying on it to communicate and share knowledge and information on a daily basis. Nevertheless, the rise in email users has occurred a dramatic increase in spam emails in recent years. Processing and managing emails properly for individuals and companies are getting increasingly difficult. This article proposes a novel technique for email spam detection that is based on a combination of convolutional neural networks, gated recurrent units, and attention mechanisms. During system training, the network is selectively focused on necessary parts of the email text. The usage of convolution layers to extract more meaningful, abstract, and generalizable features by hierarchical representation is the major contribution of this study. Additionally, this contribution incorporates cross-dataset evaluation, which enables the generation of more independent performance results from the model's training dataset. According to cross-dataset evaluation results, the proposed technique advances the results of the present attention-based techniques by utilizing temporal convolutions, which give us more flexible receptive field sizes are utilized. The suggested technique's findings are compared to those of state-of-the-art models and show that our approach outperforms them.  ( 2 min )

Current works in the generation of personalized dialogue primarily contribute to the agent avoiding contradictory persona and driving the response more informative. However, we found that the generated responses from these models are mostly self-centered with little care for the other party since they ignore the user's persona. Moreover, we consider high-quality transmission is essentially built based on apprehending the persona of the other party. Motivated by this, we propose a novel personalized dialogue generator by detecting implicit user persona. Because it's difficult to collect a large number of personas for each user, we attempt to model the user's potential persona and its representation from the dialogue absence of any external information. Perception variable and fader variable are conceived utilizing Conditional Variational Inference. The two latent variables simulate the process of people being aware of the other party's persona and producing the corresponding expression in conversation. Finally, Posterior-discriminated Regularization is presented to enhance the training procedure. Empirical studies demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art methods, ours is more concerned with the user's persona and outperforms in evaluations.  ( 2 min )

We have developed an unsupervised anomalous sound detection method for machine condition monitoring that utilizes an auxiliary task -- detecting when the target machine is active. First, we train a model that detects machine activity by using normal data with machine activity labels and then use the activity-detection error as the anomaly score for a given sound clip if we have access to the ground-truth activity labels in the inference phase. If these labels are not available, the anomaly score is calculated through outlier detection on the embedding vectors obtained by the activity-detection model. Solving this auxiliary task enables the model to learn the difference between the target machine sounds and similar background noise, which makes it possible to identify small deviations in the target sounds. Experimental results showed that the proposed method improves the anomaly-detection performance of the conventional method complementarily by means of an ensemble.  ( 2 min )

Crowd counting based on density maps is generally regarded as a regression task.Deep learning is used to learn the mapping between image content and crowd density distribution. Although great success has been achieved, some pedestrians far away from the camera are difficult to be detected. And the number of hard examples is often larger. Existing methods with simple Euclidean distance algorithm indiscriminately optimize the hard and easy examples so that the densities of hard examples are usually incorrectly predicted to be lower or even zero, which results in large counting errors. To address this problem, we are the first to propose the Hard Example Focusing(HEF) algorithm for the regression task of crowd counting. The HEF algorithm makes our model rapidly focus on hard examples by attenuating the contribution of easy examples.Then higher importance will be given to the hard examples with wrong estimations. Moreover, the scale variations in crowd scenes are large, and the scale annotations are labor-intensive and expensive. By proposing a multi-Scale Semantic Refining (SSR) strategy, lower layers of our model can break through the limitation of deep learning to capture semantic features of different scales to sufficiently deal with the scale variation. We perform extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets to verify the proposed method. Results indicate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our designed model is smaller and faster.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning occupies an undisputed dominance in crowd counting. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called SegCrowdNet. Despite the complex background in crowd scenes, the proposeSegCrowdNet still adaptively highlights the human head region and suppresses the non-head region by segmentation. With the guidance of an attention mechanism, the proposed SegCrowdNet pays more attention to the human head region and automatically encodes the highly refined density map. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the density map. To adapt the variation of crowd counts, SegCrowdNet intelligently classifies the crowd count of each image into several groups. In addition, the multi-scale features are learned and extracted in the proposed SegCrowdNet to overcome the scale variations of the crowd. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed SegCrowdNet achieves excellent performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.  ( 2 min )

We develop a simple and unified framework for nonlinear variable selection that incorporates model uncertainty and is compatible with a wide range of machine learning models (e.g., tree ensembles, kernel methods and neural network). In particular, for a learned nonlinear model $f(\mathbf{x})$, we consider quantifying the importance of an input variable $\mathbf{x}^j$ using the integrated gradient measure $\psi_j = \Vert \frac{\partial}{\partial \mathbf{x}^j} f(\mathbf{x})\Vert^2_2$. We then (1) provide a principled approach for quantifying variable selection uncertainty by deriving its posterior distribution, and (2) show that the approach is generalizable even to non-differentiable models such as tree ensembles. Rigorous Bayesian nonparametric theorems are derived to guarantee the posterior consistency and asymptotic uncertainty of the proposed approach. Extensive simulation confirms that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing classic and recent variable selection methods.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a knowledge-and-data-driven graph neural network-based collaboration learning model for reliable aircraft recognition in a heterogeneous radar network. The aircraft recognizability analysis shows that: (1) the semantic feature of an aircraft is motion patterns driven by the kinetic characteristics, and (2) the grammatical features contained in the radar cross-section (RCS) signals present spatial-temporal-frequency (STF) diversity decided by both the electromagnetic radiation shape and motion pattern of the aircraft. Then a STF graph attention convolutional network (STFGACN) is developed to distill semantic features from the RCS signals received by the heterogeneous radar network. Extensive experiment results verify that the STFGACN outperforms the baseline methods in terms of detection accuracy, and ablation experiments are carried out to further show that the expansion of the information dimension can gain considerable benefits to perform robustly in the low signal-to-noise ratio region.  ( 2 min )

The incorporation of cutting planes within the branch-and-bound algorithm, known as branch-and-cut, forms the backbone of modern integer programming solvers. These solvers are the foremost method for solving discrete optimization problems and thus have a vast array of applications in machine learning, operations research, and many other fields. Choosing cutting planes effectively is a major research topic in the theory and practice of integer programming. We conduct a novel structural analysis of branch-and-cut that pins down how every step of the algorithm is affected by changes in the parameters defining the cutting planes added to the input integer program. Our main application of this analysis is to derive sample complexity guarantees for using machine learning to determine which cutting planes to apply during branch-and-cut. These guarantees apply to infinite families of cutting planes, such as the family of Gomory mixed integer cuts, which are responsible for the main breakthrough speedups of integer programming solvers. We exploit geometric and combinatorial structure of branch-and-cut in our analysis, which provides a key missing piece for the recent generalization theory of branch-and-cut.  ( 2 min )

Knowledge graph (KG) representation learning aims to encode entities and relations into dense continuous vector spaces such that knowledge contained in a dataset could be consistently represented. Dense embeddings trained from KG datasets benefit a variety of downstream tasks such as KG completion and link prediction. However, existing KG embedding methods fell short to provide a systematic solution for the global consistency of knowledge representation. We developed a mathematical language for KG based on an observation of their inherent algebraic structure, which we termed as Knowledgebra. By analyzing five distinct algebraic properties, we proved that the semigroup is the most reasonable algebraic structure for the relation embedding of a general knowledge graph. We implemented an instantiation model, SemE, using simple matrix semigroups, which exhibits state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets. Moreover, we proposed a regularization-based method to integrate chain-like logic rules derived from human knowledge into embedding training, which further demonstrates the power of the developed language. As far as we know, by applying abstract algebra in statistical learning, this work develops the first formal language for general knowledge graphs, and also sheds light on the problem of neural-symbolic integration from an algebraic perspective.  ( 2 min )

Transformer-based models are widely used in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, and multimodal transformers have been effective in visual-language tasks. This study explores distilling visual information from pretrained multimodal transformers to pretrained language encoders. Our framework is inspired by cross-modal encoders' success in visual-language tasks while we alter the learning objective to cater to the language-heavy characteristics of NLU. After training with a small number of extra adapting steps and finetuned, the proposed XDBERT (cross-modal distilled BERT) outperforms pretrained-BERT in general language understanding evaluation (GLUE), situations with adversarial generations (SWAG) benchmarks, and readability benchmarks. We analyze the performance of XDBERT on GLUE to show that the improvement is likely visually grounded.  ( 2 min )

Recognizing human locomotion intent and activities is important for controlling the wearable robots while walking in complex environments. However, human-robot interface signals are usually user-dependent, which causes that the classifier trained on source subjects performs poorly on new subjects. To address this issue, this paper designs the ensemble diverse hypotheses and knowledge distillation (EDHKD) method to realize unsupervised cross-subject adaptation. EDH mitigates the divergence between labeled data of source subjects and unlabeled data of target subjects to accurately classify the locomotion modes of target subjects without labeling data. Compared to previous domain adaptation methods based on the single learner, which may only learn a subset of features from input signals, EDH can learn diverse features by incorporating multiple diverse feature generators and thus increases the accuracy and decreases the variance of classifying target data, but it sacrifices the efficiency. To solve this problem, EDHKD (student) distills the knowledge from the EDH (teacher) to a single network to remain efficient and accurate. The performance of the EDHKD is theoretically proved and experimentally validated on a 2D moon dataset and two public human locomotion datasets. Experimental results show that the EDHKD outperforms all other methods. The EDHKD can classify target data with 96.9%, 94.4%, and 97.4% average accuracy on the above three datasets with a short computing time (1 ms). Compared to a benchmark (BM) method, the EDHKD increases 1.3% and 7.1% average accuracy for classifying the locomotion modes of target subjects. The EDHKD also stabilizes the learning curves. Therefore, the EDHKD is significant for increasing the generalization ability and efficiency of the human intent prediction and human activity recognition system, which will improve human-robot interactions.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.  ( 2 min )

We propose a novel federated learning paradigm to model data variability among heterogeneous clients in multi-centric studies. Our method is expressed through a hierarchical Bayesian latent variable model, where client-specific parameters are assumed to be realization from a global distribution at the master level, which is in turn estimated to account for data bias and variability across clients. We show that our framework can be effectively optimized through expectation maximization (EM) over latent master's distribution and clients' parameters. We also introduce formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees compatibly with our EM optimization scheme. We tested our method on the analysis of multi-modal medical imaging data and clinical scores from distributed clinical datasets of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease. We demonstrate that our method is robust when data is distributed either in iid and non-iid manners, even when local parameters perturbation is included to provide DP guarantees. Moreover, the variability of data, views and centers can be quantified in an interpretable manner, while guaranteeing high-quality data reconstruction as compared to state-of-the-art autoencoding models and federated learning schemes. The code is available at https://gitlab.inria.fr/epione/federated-multi-views-ppca.  ( 2 min )

Crowd counting is a challenging problem due to the scene complexity and scale variation. Although deep learning has achieved great improvement in crowd counting, scene complexity affects the judgement of these methods and they usually regard some objects as people mistakenly; causing potentially enormous errors in the crowd counting result. To address the problem, we propose a novel end-to-end model called Crowd Attention Convolutional Neural Network (CAT-CNN). Our CAT-CNN can adaptively assess the importance of a human head at each pixel location by automatically encoding a confidence map. With the guidance of the confidence map, the position of human head in estimated density map gets more attention to encode the final density map, which can avoid enormous misjudgements effectively. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the final density map. To encode a highly refined density map, the total crowd count of each image is classified in a designed classification task and we first explicitly map the prior of the population-level category to feature maps. To verify the efficiency of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on three highly challenging datasets. Results establish the superiority of our method over many state-of-the-art methods.  ( 2 min )

Graph neural networks have emerged as a leading architecture for many graph-level tasks such as graph classification and graph generation with a notable improvement. Among these tasks, graph pooling is an essential component of graph neural network architectures for obtaining a holistic graph-level representation of the entire graph. Although a great variety of methods have been proposed in this promising and fast-developing research field, to the best of our knowledge, little effort has been made to systematically summarize these methods. To set the stage for the development of future works, in this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by providing a broad review of recent methods on graph pooling. Specifically, 1) we first propose a taxonomy of existing graph pooling methods and provide a mathematical summary for each category; 2) next, we provide an overview of the libraries related to graph pooling, including the commonly used datasets, model architectures for downstream tasks, and open-source implementations; 3) then, we further outline in brief the applications that incorporate the idea of graph pooling in a number of domains; 4) and finally, we discuss some critical challenges faced by the current studies and share our insights on potential directions for improving graph pooling in the future.  ( 2 min )

Adversarial training (i.e., training on adversarially perturbed input data) is a well-studied method for making neural networks robust to potential adversarial attacks during inference. However, the improved robustness does not come for free but rather is accompanied by a decrease in overall model accuracy and performance. Recent work has shown that, in practical robot learning applications, the effects of adversarial training do not pose a fair trade-off but inflict a net loss when measured in holistic robot performance. This work revisits the robustness-accuracy trade-off in robot learning by systematically analyzing if recent advances in robust training methods and theory in conjunction with adversarial robot learning can make adversarial training suitable for real-world robot applications. We evaluate a wide variety of robot learning tasks ranging from autonomous driving in a high-fidelity environment amenable to sim-to-real deployment, to mobile robot gesture recognition. Our results demonstrate that, while these techniques make incremental improvements on the trade-off on a relative scale, the negative side-effects caused by adversarial training still outweigh the improvements by an order of magnitude. We conclude that more substantial advances in robust learning methods are necessary before they can benefit robot learning tasks in practice.  ( 2 min )

Few-shot learning (FSL) is an important and topical problem in computer vision that has motivated extensive research into numerous methods spanning from sophisticated meta-learning methods to simple transfer learning baselines. We seek to push the limits of a simple-but-effective pipeline for more realistic and practical settings of few-shot image classification. To this end, we explore few-shot learning from the perspective of neural network architecture, as well as a three stage pipeline of network updates under different data supplies, where unsupervised external data is considered for pre-training, base categories are used to simulate few-shot tasks for meta-training, and the scarcely labelled data of an novel task is taken for fine-tuning. We investigate questions such as: (1) How pre-training on external data benefits FSL? (2) How state-of-the-art transformer architectures can be exploited? and (3) How fine-tuning mitigates domain shift? Ultimately, we show that a simple transformer-based pipeline yields surprisingly good performance on standard benchmarks such as Mini-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CDFSL and Meta-Dataset. Our code and demo are available at https://hushell.github.io/pmf.  ( 2 min )

Applications of machine learning in healthcare often require working with time-to-event prediction tasks including prognostication of an adverse event, re-hospitalization or death. Such outcomes are typically subject to censoring due to loss of follow up. Standard machine learning methods cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to datasets with censored outcomes. In this paper, we present auton-survival, an open-source repository of tools to streamline working with censored time-to-event or survival data. auton-survival includes tools for survival regression, adjustment in the presence of domain shift, counterfactual estimation, phenotyping for risk stratification, evaluation, as well as estimation of treatment effects. Through real world case studies employing a large subset of the SEER oncology incidence data, we demonstrate the ability of auton-survival to rapidly support data scientists in answering complex health and epidemiological questions.  ( 2 min )

We develop an unsupervised probabilistic model for heterogeneous Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Utilizing a mixture model formulation, our approach directly models sequences of arbitrary length, such as medications and laboratory results. This allows for subgrouping and incorporation of the dynamics underlying heterogeneous data types. The model consists of a layered set of latent variables that encode underlying structure in the data. These variables represent subject subgroups at the top layer, and unobserved states for sequences in the second layer. We train this model on episodic data from subjects receiving medical care in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California integrated healthcare delivery system. The resulting properties of the trained model generate novel insight from these complex and multifaceted data. In addition, we show how the model can be used to analyze sequences that contribute to assessment of mortality likelihood.  ( 2 min )

Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering inferences for complex, long-range dependencies challenging. In this paper, we develop a novel Causal Transformer for estimating counterfactual outcomes over time. Our model is specifically designed to capture complex, long-range dependencies among time-varying confounders. For this, we combine three transformer subnetworks with separate inputs for time-varying covariates, previous treatments, and previous outcomes into a joint network with in-between cross-attentions. We further develop a custom, end-to-end training procedure for our Causal Transformer. Specifically, we propose a novel counterfactual domain confusion loss to address confounding bias: it aims to learn adversarial balanced representations, so that they are predictive of the next outcome but non-predictive of the current treatment assignment. We evaluate our Causal Transformer based on synthetic and real-world datasets, where it achieves superior performance over current baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing transformer-based architecture for estimating counterfactual outcomes from longitudinal data.  ( 2 min )

With many real-world applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprising of long texts, there has been a rise in NLP benchmarks that measure the accuracy of models that can handle longer input sequences. However, these benchmarks do not consider the trade-offs between accuracy, speed, and power consumption as input sizes or model sizes are varied. In this work, we perform a systematic study of this accuracy vs. efficiency trade-off on two widely used long-sequence models - Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) and Big Bird - during fine-tuning and inference on four datasets from the SCROLLS benchmark. To study how this trade-off differs across hyperparameter settings, we compare the models across four sequence lengths (1024, 2048, 3072, 4096) and two model sizes (base and large) under a fixed resource budget. We find that LED consistently achieves better accuracy at lower energy costs than Big Bird. For summarization, we find that increasing model size is more energy efficient than increasing sequence length for higher accuracy. However, this comes at the cost of a large drop in inference speed. For question answering, we find that smaller models are both more efficient and more accurate due to the larger training batch sizes possible under a fixed resource budget.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes an active learning algorithm for solving regression and classification problems based on inverse-distance weighting functions for selecting the feature vectors to query. The algorithm has the following features: (i) supports both pool-based and population-based sampling; (ii) is independent of the type of predictor used; (iii) can handle known and unknown constraints on the queryable feature vectors; and (iv) can run either sequentially, or in batch mode, depending on how often the predictor is retrained. The method's potential is shown in numerical tests on illustrative synthetic problems and real-world regression and classification datasets from the UCI repository. A Python implementation of the algorithm that we call IDEAL (Inverse-Distance based Exploration for Active Learning), is available at \url{this http URL}.  ( 2 min )

We propose a simple yet powerful extension of Bayesian Additive Regression Trees which we name Hierarchical Embedded BART (HE-BART). The model allows for random effects to be included at the terminal node level of a set of regression trees, making HE-BART a non-parametric alternative to mixed effects models which avoids the need for the user to specify the structure of the random effects in the model, whilst maintaining the prediction and uncertainty calibration properties of standard BART. Using simulated and real-world examples, we demonstrate that this new extension yields superior predictions for many of the standard mixed effects models' example data sets, and yet still provides consistent estimates of the random effect variances. In a future version of this paper, we outline its use in larger, more advanced data sets and structures.  ( 2 min )

For many years now, understanding the brain mechanism has been a great research subject in many different fields. Brain signal processing and especially electroencephalogram (EEG) has recently known a growing interest both in academia and industry. One of the main examples is the increasing number of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) aiming to link brains and computers. In this paper, we present a novel framework allowing us to retrieve the attention state, i.e degree of attention given to a specific task, from EEG signals. While previous methods often consider the spatial relationship in EEG through electrodes and process them in recurrent or convolutional based architecture, we propose here to also exploit the spatial and temporal information with a transformer-based network that has already shown its supremacy in many machine-learning (ML) related studies, e.g. machine translation. In addition to this novel architecture, an extensive study on the feature extraction methods, frequential bands and temporal windows length has also been carried out. The proposed network has been trained and validated on two public datasets and achieves higher results compared to state-of-the-art models. As well as proposing better results, the framework could be used in real applications, e.g. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms or vigilance during a driving assessment.  ( 2 min )

There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.  ( 2 min )

Recommender systems aim to recommend new items to users by learning user and item representations. In practice, these representations are highly entangled as they consist of information about multiple factors, including user's interests, item attributes along with confounding factors such as user conformity, and item popularity. Considering these entangled representations for inferring user preference may lead to biased recommendations (e.g., when the recommender model recommends popular items even if they do not align with the user's interests). Recent research proposes to debias by modeling a recommender system from a causal perspective. The exposure and the ratings are analogous to the treatment and the outcome in the causal inference framework, respectively. The critical challenge in this setting is accounting for the hidden confounders. These confounders are unobserved, making it hard to measure them. On the other hand, since these confounders affect both the exposure and the ratings, it is essential to account for them in generating debiased recommendations. To better approximate hidden confounders, we propose to leverage network information (i.e., user-social and user-item networks), which are shown to influence how users discover and interact with an item. Aside from the user conformity, aspects of confounding such as item popularity present in the network information is also captured in our method with the aid of \textit{causal disentanglement} which unravels the learned representations into independent factors that are responsible for (a) modeling the exposure of an item to the user, (b) predicting the ratings, and (c) controlling the hidden confounders. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed model for debiasing recommender systems.  ( 2 min )

This study explores how robots and generative approaches can be used to mount successful false-acceptance adversarial attacks on signature verification systems. Initially, a convolutional neural network topology and data augmentation strategy are explored and tuned, producing an 87.12% accurate model for the verification of 2,640 human signatures. Two robots are then tasked with forging 50 signatures, where 25 are used for the verification attack, and the remaining 25 are used for tuning of the model to defend against them. Adversarial attacks on the system show that there exists an information security risk; the Line-us robotic arm can fool the system 24% of the time and the iDraw 2.0 robot 32% of the time. A conditional GAN finds similar success, with around 30% forged signatures misclassified as genuine. Following fine-tune transfer learning of robotic and generative data, adversarial attacks are reduced below the model threshold by both robots and the GAN. It is observed that tuning the model reduces the risk of attack by robots to 8% and 12%, and that conditional generative adversarial attacks can be reduced to 4% when 25 images are presented and 5% when 1000 images are presented.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural network is the widely applied technology in this decade. In spite of the fruitful applications, the mechanism behind that is still to be elucidated. We study the learning process with a very simple supervised learning encoding problem. As a result, we found a simple law, in the training response, which describes neural tangent kernel. The response consists of a power law like decay multiplied by a simple response kernel. We can construct a simple mean-field dynamical model with the law, which explains how the network learns. In the learning, the input space is split into sub-spaces along competition between the kernels. With the iterated splits and the aging, the network gets more complexity, but finally loses its plasticity.  ( 2 min )

We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global minimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We further show that the trained weights, as a function of the layer index, admits a scaling limit which is H\"older continuous as the depth of the network tends to infinity. The proofs are based on non-asymptotic estimates of the loss function and of norms of the network weights along the gradient descent path. We illustrate the relevance of our theoretical results to practical settings using detailed numerical experiments on supervised learning problems.  ( 2 min )

Phase-field modeling is an effective mesoscale method for capturing the evolution dynamics of materials, e.g., in spinodal decomposition of a two-phase mixture. However, the accuracy of high-fidelity phase field models comes at a substantial computational cost. Hence, fast and generalizable surrogate models are needed to alleviate the cost in computationally taxing processes such as in optimization and design of materials. The intrinsic discontinuous nature of the physical phenomena incurred by the presence of sharp phase boundaries makes the training of the surrogate model cumbersome. We develop a new framework that integrates a convolutional autoencoder architecture with a deep neural operator (DeepONet) to learn the dynamic evolution of a two-phase mixture. We utilize the convolutional autoencoder to provide a compact representation of the microstructure data in a low-dimensional latent space. DeepONet, which consists of two sub-networks, one for encoding the input function at a fixed number of sensors locations (branch net) and another for encoding the locations for the output functions (trunk net), learns the mesoscale dynamics of the microstructure evolution in the latent space. The decoder part of the convolutional autoencoder can then reconstruct the time-evolved microstructure from the DeepONet predictions. The result is an efficient and accurate accelerated phase-field framework that outperforms other neural-network-based approaches while at the same time being robust to noisy inputs.  ( 2 min )

The success of deep learning attracted interest in whether the brain learns hierarchical representations using gradient-based learning. However, current biologically plausible methods for gradient-based credit assignment in deep neural networks need infinitesimally small feedback signals, which is problematic in biologically realistic noisy environments and at odds with experimental evidence in neuroscience showing that top-down feedback can significantly influence neural activity. Building upon deep feedback control (DFC), a recently proposed credit assignment method, we combine strong feedback influences on neural activity with gradient-based learning and show that this naturally leads to a novel view on neural network optimization. Instead of gradually changing the network weights towards configurations with low output loss, weight updates gradually minimize the amount of feedback required from a controller that drives the network to the supervised output label. Moreover, we show that the use of strong feedback in DFC allows learning forward and feedback connections simultaneously, using a learning rule fully local in space and time. We complement our theoretical results with experiments on standard computer-vision benchmarks, showing competitive performance to backpropagation as well as robustness to noise. Overall, our work presents a fundamentally novel view of learning as control minimization, while sidestepping biologically unrealistic assumptions.  ( 2 min )

Recent advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) have leveraged promising results in solving complex problems in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), being an important tool to help in the expeditious resolution of judicial proceedings in the legal area. In this context, this work targets the problem of detecting the degree of similarity between judicial documents that can be achieved in the inference group, by applying six NLP techniques based on transformers, namely BERT, GPT-2 and RoBERTa pre-trained in the Brazilian Portuguese language and the same specialized using 210,000 legal proceedings. Documents were pre-processed and had their content transformed into a vector representation using these NLP techniques. Unsupervised learning was used to cluster the lawsuits, calculating the quality of the model based on the cosine of the distance between the elements of the group to its centroid. We noticed that models based on transformers present better performance when compared to previous research, highlighting the RoBERTa model specialized in the Brazilian Portuguese language, making it possible to advance in the current state of the art in the area of NLP applied to the legal sector.  ( 2 min )

Equivariances provide useful inductive biases in neural network modeling, with the translation equivariance of convolutional neural networks being a canonical example. Equivariances can be embedded in architectures through weight-sharing and place symmetry constraints on the functions a neural network can represent. The type of symmetry is typically fixed and has to be chosen in advance. Although some tasks are inherently equivariant, many tasks do not strictly follow such symmetries. In such cases, equivariance constraints can be overly restrictive. In this work, we propose a parameter-efficient relaxation of equivariance that can effectively interpolate between a (i) non-equivariant linear product, (ii) a strict-equivariant convolution, and (iii) a strictly-invariant mapping. The proposed parameterization can be thought of as a building block to allow adjustable symmetry structure in neural networks. Compared to non-equivariant or strict-equivariant baselines, we experimentally verify that soft equivariance leads to improved performance in terms of test accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 image classification tasks.  ( 2 min )

CP decomposition (CPD) is prevalent in chemometrics, signal processing, data mining and many more fields. While many algorithms have been proposed to compute the CPD, alternating least squares (ALS) remains one of the most widely used algorithm for computing the decomposition. Recent works have introduced the notion of eigenvalues and singular values of a tensor and explored applications of eigenvectors and singular vectors in areas like signal processing, data analytics and in various other fields. We introduce a new formulation for deriving singular values and vectors of a tensor by considering the critical points of a function different from what is used in the previous work. Computing these critical points in an alternating manner motivates an alternating optimization algorithm which corresponds to alternating least squares algorithm in the matrix case. However, for tensors with order greater than equal to $3$, it minimizes an objective function which is different from the commonly used least squares loss. Alternating optimization of this new objective leads to simple updates to the factor matrices with the same asymptotic computational cost as ALS. We show that a subsweep of this algorithm can achieve a superlinear convergence rate for exact CPD with known rank and verify it experimentally. We then view the algorithm as optimizing a Mahalanobis distance with respect to each factor with ground metric dependent on the other factors. This perspective allows us to generalize our approach to interpolate between updates corresponding to the ALS and the new algorithm to manage the tradeoff between stability and fitness of the decomposition. Our experimental results show that for approximating synthetic and real-world tensors, this algorithm and its variants converge to a better conditioned decomposition with comparable and sometimes better fitness as compared to the ALS algorithm.  ( 2 min )

Engineering design of origami systems is challenging because comparing different origami patterns requires using categorical features and evaluating multi-physics behavior targets introduces multi-objective problems. This work shows that a decision tree machine learning method is particularly suitable for the inverse design of origami. This interpretable machine learning method can reveal complex interactions between categorical features and continuous features for comparing different origami patterns, can tackle multi-objective problems for designing active origami with multi-physics performance targets, and can extend existing origami shape fitting algorithms to further consider non-geometrical performances of origami systems. The proposed framework shows a holistic way of designing active origami systems for various applications such as metamaterials, deployable structures, soft robots, biomedical devices, and many more.  ( 2 min )

The thermomechanical properties of energetic materials (EM) are known to be a function of their microscopic structures, i.e., morphological configurations of crystals and pores. This microstructural dependency has motivated vigorous research in the EM community, seeking to engineer material microstructures with targeted properties and performance under the materials-by-design paradigm. However, establishing the complex structure-property-performance (SPP) relationships of EMs demands extensive experimental and simulation efforts, and assimilating and encapsulating these relationships in usable models is a challenge. Here, we present a novel deep learning method, Physics-Aware Recurrent Convolutional (PARC) Neural Network, that can "learn" the mesoscale thermo-mechanics of EM microstructures during the shock-to-detonation transition (SDT). We show that this new approach can produce accurate high-fidelity predictions of time-evolving temperature and pressure fields of the same quality as the state-of-the-art direct numerical simulations (DNS), despite the dramatic reduction of computing time, from hours and days on a high-performance computing cluster (HPC) to a little more than a second on a commodity laptop. We also demonstrate that PARC can provide physical insights, i.e., the artificial neurons can illuminate the underlying physics by identifying which microstructural features led to critical hotspots and what are the characteristics of "critical" versus "non-critical" microstructures. This new knowledge generated alongside the capacity to conduct high-throughput experiments will broaden our theoretical understanding of the initiation mechanisms of EM detonation, as a step towards engineering EMs with specific properties.  ( 2 min )

Likelihood-based, or explicit, deep generative models use neural networks to construct flexible high-dimensional densities. This formulation directly contradicts the manifold hypothesis, which states that observed data lies on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high-dimensional ambient space. In this paper we investigate the pathologies of maximum-likelihood training in the presence of this dimensionality mismatch. We formally prove that degenerate optima are achieved wherein the manifold itself is learned but not the distribution on it, a phenomenon we call manifold overfitting. We propose a class of two-step procedures consisting of a dimensionality reduction step followed by maximum-likelihood density estimation, and prove that they recover the data-generating distribution in the nonparametric regime, thus avoiding manifold overfitting. We also show that these procedures enable density estimation on the manifolds learned by implicit models, such as generative adversarial networks, hence addressing a major shortcoming of these models. Several recently proposed methods are instances of our two-step procedures; we thus unify, extend, and theoretically justify a large class of models.  ( 2 min )

Applications of machine learning in healthcare often require working with time-to-event prediction tasks including prognostication of an adverse event, re-hospitalization or death. Such outcomes are typically subject to censoring due to loss of follow up. Standard machine learning methods cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to datasets with censored outcomes. In this paper, we present auton-survival, an open-source repository of tools to streamline working with censored time-to-event or survival data. auton-survival includes tools for survival regression, adjustment in the presence of domain shift, counterfactual estimation, phenotyping for risk stratification, evaluation, as well as estimation of treatment effects. Through real world case studies employing a large subset of the SEER oncology incidence data, we demonstrate the ability of auton-survival to rapidly support data scientists in answering complex health and epidemiological questions.

Likelihood-based, or explicit, deep generative models use neural networks to construct flexible high-dimensional densities. This formulation directly contradicts the manifold hypothesis, which states that observed data lies on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high-dimensional ambient space. In this paper we investigate the pathologies of maximum-likelihood training in the presence of this dimensionality mismatch. We formally prove that degenerate optima are achieved wherein the manifold itself is learned but not the distribution on it, a phenomenon we call manifold overfitting. We propose a class of two-step procedures consisting of a dimensionality reduction step followed by maximum-likelihood density estimation, and prove that they recover the data-generating distribution in the nonparametric regime, thus avoiding manifold overfitting. We also show that these procedures enable density estimation on the manifolds learned by implicit models, such as generative adversarial networks, hence addressing a major shortcoming of these models. Several recently proposed methods are instances of our two-step procedures; we thus unify, extend, and theoretically justify a large class of models.

The Monge-Amp\`ere equation is a fully nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) of fundamental importance in analysis, geometry and in the applied sciences. In this paper we solve the Dirichlet problem associated with the Monge-Amp\`ere equation using neural networks and we show that an ansatz using deep input convex neural networks can be used to find the unique convex solution. As part of our analysis we study the effect of singularities, discontinuities and noise in the source function, we consider nontrivial domains, and we investigate how the method performs in higher dimensions. We also compare this method to an alternative approach in which standard feed-forward networks are used together with a loss function which penalizes lack of convexity.

Compressing deep neural networks while maintaining accuracy is important when we want to deploy large, powerful models in production and/or edge devices. One common technique used to achieve this goal is knowledge distillation. Typically, the output of a static pre-defined teacher (a large base network) is used as soft labels to train and transfer information to a student (or smaller) network. In this paper, we introduce Adjoined Networks, or AN, a learning paradigm that trains both the original base network and the smaller compressed network together. In our training approach, the parameters of the smaller network are shared across both the base and the compressed networks. Using our training paradigm, we can simultaneously compress (the student network) and regularize (the teacher network) any architecture. In this paper, we focus on popular CNN-based architectures used for computer vision tasks. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation of our training paradigm on various large-scale datasets. Using ResNet-50 as the base network, AN achieves 71.8% top-1 accuracy with only 1.8M parameters and 1.6 GFLOPs on the ImageNet data-set. We further propose Differentiable Adjoined Networks (DAN), a training paradigm that augments AN by using neural architecture search to jointly learn both the width and the weights for each layer of the smaller network. DAN achieves ResNet-50 level accuracy on ImageNet with $3.8\times$ fewer parameters and $2.2\times$ fewer FLOPs.

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the distance of nearest neighbors in the low dimensional representational space to gauge novelty. We then leverage these intrinsic rewards for sample-efficient exploration with planning routines in representational space for hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards. One key element of our approach is the use of information theoretic principles to shape our representations in a way so that our novelty reward goes beyond pixel similarity. We test our approach on a number of maze tasks, as well as a control problem and show that our exploration approach is more sample-efficient compared to strong baselines.

Recommender systems aim to recommend new items to users by learning user and item representations. In practice, these representations are highly entangled as they consist of information about multiple factors, including user's interests, item attributes along with confounding factors such as user conformity, and item popularity. Considering these entangled representations for inferring user preference may lead to biased recommendations (e.g., when the recommender model recommends popular items even if they do not align with the user's interests). Recent research proposes to debias by modeling a recommender system from a causal perspective. The exposure and the ratings are analogous to the treatment and the outcome in the causal inference framework, respectively. The critical challenge in this setting is accounting for the hidden confounders. These confounders are unobserved, making it hard to measure them. On the other hand, since these confounders affect both the exposure and the ratings, it is essential to account for them in generating debiased recommendations. To better approximate hidden confounders, we propose to leverage network information (i.e., user-social and user-item networks), which are shown to influence how users discover and interact with an item. Aside from the user conformity, aspects of confounding such as item popularity present in the network information is also captured in our method with the aid of \textit{causal disentanglement} which unravels the learned representations into independent factors that are responsible for (a) modeling the exposure of an item to the user, (b) predicting the ratings, and (c) controlling the hidden confounders. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed model for debiasing recommender systems.

Tensor PCA is a stylized statistical inference problem introduced by Montanari and Richard to study the computational difficulty of estimating an unknown parameter from higher-order moment tensors. Unlike its matrix counterpart, Tensor PCA exhibits a statistical-computational gap, i.e., a sample size regime where the problem is information-theoretically solvable but conjectured to be computationally hard. This paper derives computational lower bounds on the run-time of memory bounded algorithms for Tensor PCA using communication complexity. These lower bounds specify a trade-off among the number of passes through the data sample, the sample size, and the memory required by any algorithm that successfully solves Tensor PCA. While the lower bounds do not rule out polynomial-time algorithms, they do imply that many commonly-used algorithms, such as gradient descent and power method, must have a higher iteration count when the sample size is not large enough. Similar lower bounds are obtained for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis, a family of statistical estimation problems in which low-order moment tensors carry no information about the unknown parameter. Finally, stronger lower bounds are obtained for an asymmetric variant of Tensor PCA and related statistical estimation problems. These results explain why many estimators for these problems use a memory state that is significantly larger than the effective dimensionality of the parameter of interest.

Recent advances in diffusion models bring the state-of-the art performance on image generation tasks. However, empirical results on previous research in diffusion models imply that there is an inverse correlation on performances for density estimation and sample generation. This paper analyzes that the inverse correlation arises because density estimation is mostly contributed from small diffusion time, whereas sample generation mainly depends on large diffusion time. However, training score network on both small and large diffusion time is demanding because of the loss imbalance issue. To successfully train the score network on both small and large diffusion time, this paper introduces a training technique, Soft Truncation, that softens the truncation time for every mini-batch update, which is universally applicable to any types of diffusion models. It turns out that Soft Truncation is equivalent to a diffusion model with a general weight, and we prove the variational bound of the general weighted diffusion model. In view of this variational bound, Soft Truncation becomes a natural way to train the score network. In experiments, Soft Truncation achieves the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CelebA, CelebA-HQ $256\times 256$, and STL-10 datasets.  ( 2 min )

Latent Gaussian models and boosting are widely used techniques in statistics and machine learning. Tree-boosting shows excellent prediction accuracy on many data sets, but potential drawbacks are that it assumes conditional independence of samples, produces discontinuous predictions for, e.g., spatial data, and it can have difficulty with high-cardinality categorical variables. Latent Gaussian models, such as Gaussian process and grouped random effects models, are flexible prior models which explicitly model dependence among samples and which allow for efficient learning of predictor functions and for making probabilistic predictions. However, existing latent Gaussian models usually assume either a zero or a linear prior mean function which can be an unrealistic assumption. This article introduces a novel approach that combines boosting and latent Gaussian models to remedy the above-mentioned drawbacks and to leverage the advantages of both techniques. We obtain increased prediction accuracy compared to existing approaches in both simulated and real-world data experiments.  ( 2 min )

Amounts of historical data collected increase and business intelligence applicability with automatic forecasting of time series are in high demand. While no single time series modeling method is universal to all types of dynamics, forecasting using an ensemble of several methods is often seen as a compromise. Instead of fixing ensemble diversity and size, we propose to predict these aspects adaptively using meta-learning. Meta-learning here considers two separate random forest regression models, built on 390 time-series features, to rank 22 univariate forecasting methods and recommend ensemble size. The forecasting ensemble is consequently formed from methods ranked as the best, and forecasts are pooled using either simple or weighted average (with a weight corresponding to reciprocal rank). The proposed approach was tested on 12561 micro-economic time-series (expanded to 38633 for various forecasting horizons) of M4 competition where meta-learning outperformed Theta and Comb benchmarks by relative forecasting errors for all data types and horizons. Best overall results were achieved by weighted pooling with a symmetric mean absolute percentage error of 9.21% versus 11.05% obtained using the Theta method.  ( 2 min )

We develop methods for reducing the dimensionality of large data sets, common in biomedical applications. Learning about patients using genetic data often includes more features than observations, which makes direct supervised learning difficult. One method of reducing the feature space is to use latent Dirichlet allocation to group genetic variants in an unsupervised manner. Latent Dirichlet allocation describes a patient as a mixture of topics corresponding to genetic variants. This can be generalized as a Bayesian tensor decomposition to account for multiple feature variables. Our most significant contributions are with hierarchical topic modeling. We design distinct methods of incorporating hierarchical topic modeling, based on nested Chinese restaurant processes and Pachinko Allocation Machine, into Bayesian tensor decomposition. We apply these models to examine patients with one of four common types of cancer (breast, lung, prostate, and colorectal) and siblings with and without autism spectrum disorder. We linked the genes with their biological pathways and combine this information into a tensor of patients, counts of their genetic variants, and the genes' membership in pathways. We find that our trained models outperform baseline models, with respect to coherence, by up to 40%.  ( 2 min )

One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to modelling sparse time-varying networks. A positive parameter is associated to each node of a network, which models the sociability of that node. Sociabilities are assumed to evolve over time, and are modelled via a dynamic point process model. The model is able to capture long term evolution of the sociabilities. Moreover, it yields sparse graphs, where the number of edges grows subquadratically with the number of nodes. The evolution of the sociabilities is described by a tractable time-varying generalised gamma process. We provide some theoretical insights into the model and apply it to three datasets: a simulated network, a network of hyperlinks between communities on Reddit, and a network of co-occurences of words in Reuters news articles after the September 11th attacks.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning with differential privacy, or private federated learning, provides a strategy to train machine learning models while respecting users' privacy. However, differential privacy can disproportionately degrade the performance of the models on under-represented groups, as these parts of the distribution are difficult to learn in the presence of noise. Existing approaches for enforcing fairness in machine learning models have considered the centralized setting, in which the algorithm has access to the users' data. This paper introduces an algorithm to enforce group fairness in private federated learning, where users' data does not leave their devices. First, the paper extends the modified method of differential multipliers to empirical risk minimization with fairness constraints, thus providing an algorithm to enforce fairness in the central setting. Then, this algorithm is extended to the private federated learning setting. The proposed algorithm, \texttt{FPFL}, is tested on a federated version of the Adult dataset and an "unfair" version of the FEMNIST dataset. The experiments on these datasets show how private federated learning accentuates unfairness in the trained models, and how FPFL is able to mitigate such unfairness.  ( 2 min )

We develop a simple and unified framework for nonlinear variable selection that incorporates model uncertainty and is compatible with a wide range of machine learning models (e.g., tree ensembles, kernel methods and neural network). In particular, for a learned nonlinear model $f(\mathbf{x})$, we consider quantifying the importance of an input variable $\mathbf{x}^j$ using the integrated gradient measure $\psi_j = \Vert \frac{\partial}{\partial \mathbf{x}^j} f(\mathbf{x})\Vert^2_2$. We then (1) provide a principled approach for quantifying variable selection uncertainty by deriving its posterior distribution, and (2) show that the approach is generalizable even to non-differentiable models such as tree ensembles. Rigorous Bayesian nonparametric theorems are derived to guarantee the posterior consistency and asymptotic uncertainty of the proposed approach. Extensive simulation confirms that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing classic and recent variable selection methods.  ( 2 min )

We provide a new analysis of local SGD, removing unnecessary assumptions and elaborating on the difference between two data regimes: identical and heterogeneous. In both cases, we improve the existing theory and provide values of the optimal stepsize and optimal number of local iterations. Our bounds are based on a new notion of variance that is specific to local SGD methods with different data. The tightness of our results is guaranteed by recovering known statements when we plug $H=1$, where $H$ is the number of local steps. The empirical evidence further validates the severe impact of data heterogeneity on the performance of local SGD.  ( 2 min )

Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering inferences for complex, long-range dependencies challenging. In this paper, we develop a novel Causal Transformer for estimating counterfactual outcomes over time. Our model is specifically designed to capture complex, long-range dependencies among time-varying confounders. For this, we combine three transformer subnetworks with separate inputs for time-varying covariates, previous treatments, and previous outcomes into a joint network with in-between cross-attentions. We further develop a custom, end-to-end training procedure for our Causal Transformer. Specifically, we propose a novel counterfactual domain confusion loss to address confounding bias: it aims to learn adversarial balanced representations, so that they are predictive of the next outcome but non-predictive of the current treatment assignment. We evaluate our Causal Transformer based on synthetic and real-world datasets, where it achieves superior performance over current baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing transformer-based architecture for estimating counterfactual outcomes from longitudinal data.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic Linear Models (DLMs) are commonly employed for time series analysis due to their versatile structure, simple recursive updating, ability to handle missing data, and probabilistic forecasting. However, the options for count time series are limited: Gaussian DLMs require continuous data, while Poisson-based alternatives often lack sufficient modeling flexibility. We introduce a novel semiparametric methodology for count time series by warping a Gaussian DLM. The warping function has two components: a (nonparametric) transformation operator that provides distributional flexibility and a rounding operator that ensures the correct support for the discrete data-generating process. We develop conjugate inference for the warped DLM, which enables analytic and recursive updates for the state space filtering and smoothing distributions. We leverage these results to produce customized and efficient algorithms for inference and forecasting, including Monte Carlo simulation for offline analysis and an optimal particle filter for online inference. This framework unifies and extends a variety of discrete time series models and is valid for natural counts, rounded values, and multivariate observations. Simulation studies illustrate the excellent forecasting capabilities of the warped DLM. The proposed approach is applied to a multivariate time series of daily overdose counts and demonstrates both modeling and computational successes.  ( 2 min )

Invertible neural networks (INNs) are neural network architectures with invertibility by design. Thanks to their invertibility and the tractability of Jacobian, INNs have various machine learning applications such as probabilistic modeling, generative modeling, and representation learning. However, their attractive properties often come at the cost of restricting the layer designs, which poses a question on their representation power: can we use these models to approximate sufficiently diverse functions? To answer this question, we have developed a general theoretical framework to investigate the representation power of INNs, building on a structure theorem of differential geometry. The framework simplifies the approximation problem of diffeomorphisms, which enables us to show the universal approximation properties of INNs. We apply the framework to two representative classes of INNs, namely Coupling-Flow-based INNs (CF-INNs) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), and elucidate their high representation power despite the restrictions on their architectures.  ( 2 min )

In the pooled data problem we are given a set of $n$ agents, each of which holds a hidden state bit, either $0$ or $1$. A querying procedure returns for a query set the sum of the states of the queried agents. The goal is to reconstruct the states using as few queries as possible. In this paper we consider two noise models for the pooled data problem. In the noisy channel model, the result for each agent flips with a certain probability. In the noisy query model, each query result is subject to random Gaussian noise. Our results are twofold. First, we present and analyze for both error models a simple and efficient distributed algorithm that reconstructs the initial states in a greedy fashion. Our novel analysis pins down the range of error probabilities and distributions for which our algorithm reconstructs the exact initial states with high probability. Secondly, we present simulation results of our algorithm and compare its performance with approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms that are conjectured to be optimal in a number of related problems.  ( 2 min )

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Video (Despacito, slightly NSFW): https://drive.google.com/file/d/12qYKv_yaqGr9GWvHPtE9ng2foJVPfpoE/view?usp=sharing Code & more info: https://github.com/athairus/SpoonfyDemo Discord: https://discord.gg/7wcZZzeSQk Spoonfy is essentially the so-called Telenovela method (learning languages through subtitled video) on steroids: This demo uses a finetuned Facebook's M2M100 model to translate Spanish to English (finetuned to do literal translation instead of ordinary translation) and a wav2vec2 model to get Spanish word timings to present the literal (aka word-by-word) translations as karaoke-style lyrics. What sets Spoonfy apart from other solutions is the way it leverages the massive body of existing subtitled content out there to create learning material. Also because it's FOSS. More details in the code's README. I've been working on this project by myself for a few months now, I hope you see potential behind it like I do! If so (but also if not), I'd love to hear what you think. And I'd love to get your help improving on what I already built. I have plenty of ideas for how to make the translations even more accurate, the system more robust & able to handle more sources of content (YouTube, TikTok, Blu-Rays), etc. Thanks for checking it out! submitted by /u/athairus [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

In robotics and autonomous systems, knowledge representation is an important aspect. What is your favorite methods for knowledge representation, is it Formal logic or graphs or whatever and why you like that kind of representation. Considering the success of large language model isn't it a good time to use them in new kind of representation, so that robots or similar system can make better decisions in an environment. I still feel there is no common consensus in community for correct way of knowledge representation, correct me If I am wrong. submitted by /u/projekt_treadstone [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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How do they compare in terms of the communities, prestige, competitiveness, and impact. I have a paper accepted to a CVPR workshop and considering extending it and submitting to one of these. The work is based on explainability in medical vision. It's more methods-oriented rather than large-scale experiments. What are your suggestions? submitted by /u/avd4292 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Recently, I decided to explore NeRF and found a very interesting dataset in the NeRS paper of 3D models, which was published in NeurIPS 2021 four months ago. Authors promised to release their dataset: The filtered dataset with anonymized personally identifiable information (e.g. license plates and phone numbers), masks, initial camera poses, and optimized NeRS cameras will be made available on the project page. However, if you check their project page or github repo — there is nothing there. I do not have much experience in machine learning, but wonder whether it's ok to do this? My thinking was that it is something to look down upon, but in this case it is done by Carnegie Mellon University (which is a top-tier one in ML?) on a top-tier conference (NeurIPS 2021). So I assume it's fine? submitted by /u/throwmeaway-account [link] [comments]  ( 5 min )

Hi, I heard there are different ways to calculate Wasserstein distance in Neural network context. First, We can convert 1-d Wasserstein loss to dual representation and constraint it's size(to makes lipschitz function). We need to do weight clip to make our model a lipschitz function. Second, we can make neural network output as Gaussian distribution and calculate easy form using neural network output as mean and covariance matrix. So, what are the advantages and disadvantages of comparing them? It may sound ambiguous, but I have not seen a study that compares the two about representation quality, computation, etc... Thank you for reading. submitted by /u/Spiritual_Fig3632 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I've noticed a lot of folks in ML have a personal website that doubles as a blog to write about their work/projects. As someone looking to build their own website along the same lines, I'm looking for frameworks to try and build it with. What framework do you use to design your site? submitted by /u/SwiftLynx [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

Hi All! I've been working on a linear method that extracts signals from images by learning a set of composable image filters. It can recompose an image using these filters as seen on this biological histology tissue (real on the right, recomposed on the left) ​ ​ https://preview.redd.it/czgdk6edx0u81.png?width=768&format=png&auto=webp&s=8768f93a749fff7dc41e576a74403096e113942e ​ Because it is a linear method that learns image filters - I had an idea: what if some components of a neural network could be replaced with a learnable set of filters? For those not in the know, image filters are similar to masks that upweight some parts of the image, and downweights other parts - similar to a highlighter to select text and a pen to cross out words. I show how in the figure below: ​ ​ https://preview.redd.it/2azco14ex0u81.jpg?width=499&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f3795fec06daa13da61ec155159a0ad865524530 ​ Learning a set of image filters with a neural network is a good idea, as neural networks are much more flexible and are considered to be "universal function approximations". So I wrote up a Pytorch package to pass the neural network feature weights from Convolutions and Max Pooling into the linear method to learn a relevant set of filters - results are comparable even on CIFAR10. The caveat is that there is no ReLU, no other activation functions, and no Dropout - only 1 main single linear layer that learns filters... an interpretable neural network! ​ Results are all here (including ipynb comparing with base CNN and VGG16) https://github.com/AskExplain/Interpretable-Neural-Net ​ I'll update the GitHub with some figures of why the single layer is interpretable soon ... ​ In the meantime - discuss! submitted by /u/TryToExplainHow [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

Hello! I recently built grafog, a graph data augmentation library on top of PyTorch Geometric. You can chain together graph mentations as done in albumentations or torchvision.transforms. Check it out: https://github.com/rish-16/grafog It has the following augmentations: Random Node Drop Random Edge Drop Normalize Features MixUp Strategy Node Feature Masking Edge Feature Masking https://preview.redd.it/c53r7gkrk0u81.png?width=689&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fbe668e82571a7fe5de9ebb5e4690dbd34032bb https://preview.redd.it/5zrj4gkrk0u81.png?width=863&format=png&auto=webp&s=5bd02ea4adaf86b8911fa89372be9f05f9010536 Happy augmenting! submitted by /u/rish-16 [link] [comments]

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I've the feeling that this question may be really stupid but I make it anyway. In ML we often see ablative studies. How is the opposite of it called? In other words: A study that aim to improve a model, and once an improvement is reached, this new model is taken as basis for further investigations? submitted by /u/Rogitus [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

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Hello everyone I'm newbie so pardon me if you find that my question is stupid. I'm working on a project here's it's description in a nutshell ( Classifying companies if they're going to bankrupt or not and based of the probability of default ( probability of bankruptcy) give each companies a score For example 88 percent to bankrupt score is D 21 percent to bankrupt score is B 3 percent to bankrupt score is a) My question is what kind of models should test ? Should i go for machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, knn, SVM? Should I go for neural networks ANN? Or can I use deep learning models like MLP... probabilistic Neural Network? Any guidance or advice will be appreciated and thanks a lot. submitted by /u/YeccAnon4 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi I am doing a project where I have to predict sales for a company and I am having some trouble with my LSTM model in python. All research I have done tells me that LSTM is as good, if not better, than a ARIMA model for forecasting on time series data, but my LSTM is significantly worse than my ARIMA model. Would it be possible for any one to help me to see if I have implemented it right? I have used both Tensorflow and Pytorch and both are way worse than the ARIMA model. submitted by /u/magnussendjoko [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, everyone. I'm a relative novice in RL, so bear with me as I try to formulate my question. I'm working on a chess bot that can play moves like a player (imitate their style of play) that is chosen from a set of players (that the bot is trained on) , if I give the bot the previous x moves. Using more technical terms, I'm trying to create an agent that is given a sequence of states-actions of another agent (player) and some representation of who that agent (player) is, and predict the next action (continue playing in the style of that player). I'm fairly certain this is an RL problem, as I don't know how to frame it as a supervised learning problem (I might be wrong). I've seen some papers that abstract offline RL as a sequence modeling problem (Decision Transformer, Trajectory Transformer), so I'm fairly certain I should continue in a similar manner. But I'm having a hard time trying to understand how to treat the difference in players. My instinct was to use some representation of the player as the reward, but then how would I even optimize for it or even give it as an input? Do I just add the player as a feature in the game state, but then what should be the reward? Has this been done before, or something similar? I couldn't really find any paper or code that worked on differentiating the training data by who made it (I might not be wording it correctly). submitted by /u/OverhypeUnderdeliver [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

Data has become a huge area of business, helping businesses to drive their intelligence, make better decisions, and formulate strategic plans for future growth. The post Using Data Warehousing as a Service (DWaaS) To Improve Customer Experience appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 7 min )

The LIGO observatory can detect astronomical events from billions of light years away. Terabytes of complex daily data makes human analysis impossible. New study applies neural network with up to 97% classification accuracy. Caltech/MIT’s LIGO, the largest gravitational-wave observatory in the world, collects data on minute space-time ripples from cataclysmic astronomical events like colliding black… Read More »ML classifies gravitational-wave glitches with high accuracy The post ML classifies gravitational-wave glitches with high accuracy appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 4 min )

The central principle of the Zero Trust model is based on the authentication and verification of every device connecting to the network before they are trusted. Former Forrester analyst and veteran of the high-technology world, John Kindervag, who has been actively part of a wide array of network technology projects, coined the term “Zero Trust”… Read More »Zero Trust Principles: What is Zero Trust Model? The post Zero Trust Principles: What is Zero Trust Model? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 4 min )

A few questions about ACL ARR: - If you request to reassign a reviewer, would the editor aim for reassigning all three reviewers or he would go for reassigning only that particular reviewer? Assume you have given a valid reason for reassignment and the editor is convinced. - If you request to reassign a reviewer, can the new reviewer see the previous reviews/scores before submitting his own review? Or he would access to the previous revision after submitting his own review. I already know (have heard) that in many cases reviewers are not available, and it becomes inevitable to get an entirely new set of reviews. I already know this. But my questions are about the case that the reviewer availability is not an issue. Juts trying to find out how things are managed submitted by /u/sim_inf [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Say that a masters student graduates in a DS program with heavy focus on data and CS (so knows the basics of CS like data structures and programming, and has also studied courses like data mining, big data analytics, and machine learning), what are their possible job openings and relatively easy positions to get into? My understanding is really rudimentaly, feel free to correct me pls: Data scientist, this should be the most fitting and easy-to-get-interview position. Difficulty level 1/5. Data analyist, same as 1. Difficulty level 1/5. Data engineer, same as 1. Difficulty level 1/5. Machine learning engineer, has a higher bar than 1, 2, and 3, and it's very difficult to get interviews without proper background and work experience. So it's very difficult to become one for a masters graduate in DS, but it's quite possible for DS/DE (but much less so for DA) to make into MLE positions. Difficulty level 3/5. Software engineer, it's totally another realm, and has very few skill overlap with 1, 2, and 3. So it's very hard to make the transition or land a SWE job for DS students. Difficulty level 5/5. submitted by /u/Competitive_Map_935 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hey all, I am looking to learn more about how to incorporate node features with their embeddings for training. Specifically, I am working with gene-gene interaction networks, and also want to include RNA-sequencing quantifications. If anyone has a good introductory resource so I can familiarize myself with the process, I would really appreciate it! submitted by /u/PM_ME_A_ONELINER [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

This isn't meant to be a rant. Rather far from it. Yesterday I posted a legitimate question about databases choices in r/MachineLearning. This was about what technical choices ML members are currently using for large scale data ingestion in a continual learning environment. The post was removed. That post was neither a (1) beginner nor (2) offensive and (3) aimed to be a constructive discussion suitable as mid-range ML query and (4) marked with appropriate flair I finally posted it elsewhere. Yet today I see questions about transitions between DS -> MLE and quirky labgroup names which can be used from ML terms. These aren't even research questions. https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/u503vz/d_is_it_easier_to_transition_to_mle_as_a_ds_or_swe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/u5091o/d_do_you_know_any_funny_team_names_with/ How is this fair moderation genuinely? How can we improve the noise filter or do better moderation? submitted by /u/mlbloke [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

So I watched this old video by Microsoft Research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psA4U6nhZ70 To summarize, it uses the fairness criteria that sensitive attribute A will give the same prediction regardless of the value, when using counterfactuals. That is, if you're male or female, it shouldn't influence the models predictions. The idea seems decent at first glance. But what if the "bias" or "unfairness" that the model creates based on sensitive attribute A isn't caused by a dataset bias but rather detects a real signal in the data? The model proposed by Microsoft Research doesn't take into consideration that the prediction on the sensitive attribute A does not necessarily consist of ONLY unfairness. They simply define it as such. Is such an algorithmic design choice not exactly one of the flaws that we seek to eliminate? Assuming, that not all of the imbalance in predictions by the model on the sensitive attribute A is caused by "unfairness" but that some of it is caused by an inherent difference, then are they not introducing direct human bias and unfairness into their model by explicitedly designing the system to fit their own human (and political) bias? Don't get me wrong; the opposite is just as bad. Assuming that ALL of the imbalance in the prediction on the sensitive attribute A is caused by "inherent differences" is just as bad. Do you know of anyone that has tackled this in a good manner? How would you even begin to estimate how much is due to an "inherent difference" and how much is due to "bias, unfairness, noise" (or otherwise)? submitted by /u/caahel [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

https://youtu.be/qlB0TPBQ7YY Search engines work by building an index and then looking up things in it. Usually, that index is a separate data structure. In keyword search, we build and store reverse indices. In neural search, we build nearest-neighbor indices. This paper does something different: It directly trains a Transformer to return the ID of the most relevant document. No similarity search over embeddings or anything like this is performed, and no external data structure is needed, as the entire index is essentially captured by the model's weights. The paper experiments with various ways of representing documents and training the system, which works surprisingly well! OUTLINE: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Sponsor: Diffgram 1:35 - Paper overview 3:15 - The search problem, classic and neural 8:15 - Seq2seq for directly predicting document IDs 11:05 - Differentiable search index architecture 18:05 - Indexing 25:15 - Retrieval and document representation 33:25 - Training DSI 39:15 - Experimental results 49:25 - Comments & Conclusions ​ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06991 submitted by /u/ykilcher [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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I wrote this article breaking down how Spotify have applied semantic search to enhance podcast discovery. I find it super interesting to see the approach Spotify have used in terms of data sources, model fine-tuning, and vector search - and wanted to show how to almost replicate it. Let me know if you have any thoughts on their approach! submitted by /u/jamescalam [link] [comments]

In this work, we have covered a deep study of alternatives in order to improve the aquaculture of mussels with very noisy and unbalanced data https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168169922002733 submitted by /u/ennanco [link] [comments]

We have just released v0.0.2 of our RR-GCN. This release includes support for multi-modal learning. Node embeddings can now be initialised with literal information or pre-trained embeddings for text and image data. Go check out our notebooks that show how we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets in less than one minute. Moreover, and more importantly, the representations produced by our RR-GCN are unsupervised and parameter-free (i.e. no training is required), making it possible to re-use them for multiple downstream ML tasks with high predictive performances. ​ https://github.com/predict-idlab/RR-GCN submitted by /u/givdwiel [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

https://youtu.be/XHAoV_nKr1o This video explains the 10 billion parameter SEER model from MetaAI by Goyal et al. 2022. Paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08360 Official implementation: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vissl/tree/main/projects/SEER Short description: The 10 billion parameter SEER model from u/MetaAI is *fairer*, even though it is trained on *uncurated* data. How so? Check out our take on this. Outline: 00:00 Training on uncurated data 01:12 Diffgram (Sponsor) 01:46 Toxicity in large models 02:43 What to do against model toxicity? 03:53 SEER model explained 06:52 SEER is fairer. But how? submitted by /u/AICoffeeBreak [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

He’s basically this wacky dead philosopher with 1000s of hours of his lectures of YT and I was thinking it may be possible to create an artificial AI personality of his from all of his recorded speech? Would there be a simple enough program I could download or anything of the sort? submitted by /u/Vaporshots [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Looks Amazing. The vibe is there. What do you think ? How did he archive this ? Created by Hand or through artificial ? https://www.tiktok.com/@ai.metascape/video/7086451191151971586 submitted by /u/PillowG1rl [link] [comments]

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LinkedIn research team has recently open-sourced feature store, Feathr, created to simplify machine learning (ML) feature management and increase developer productivity. Feathr is used by dozens of LinkedIn applications to define features, compute them for training, deploy them in production, and share them across consumers. Compared to previous application-specific feature pipeline solutions, Feathr users reported significantly reduced time required to add new features to model training and improved runtime performance. Hundreds of ML models run on LinkedIn in Search, Feed, and Ads applications. Thousands of features about entities in the Economic Graph, such as companies, job postings, and LinkedIn members, power the models. The most time-consuming aspects of handling the ML applications at scale have been preparing and managing features. Continue reading the summary Github: https://github.com/linkedin/feathr LinkedIn Blog: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2022/open-sourcing-feathr—linkedin-s-feature-store-for-productive-m submitted by /u/No_Coffee_4638 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/Thenamessd [link] [comments]

Multimodal: A python package to ensemble speech, text, etc. models and build new applications. Sample Applications: Speech Named Entity Anonymizer, Speech Question Answering, Speech Generation Code: kritiksoman/Multimodal: Listen. Write. Speak. Read. Think. (github.com) submitted by /u/kritiksoman [link] [comments]

I am looking for a book/monograph that goes through all the basics of reinforcement learning for continuous spaces with mathematical rigor. The classic RL book from Sutton/Barto and the new RL theory book from Agarwal/Jiang/Kakade/Sun both stick to finite MDPs except for special cases like linear MDPs and the LQR. I assume that a general statement of the fundamentals for continuous spaces will require grinding through a lot of details on existence, measurability, suprema vs. maxima, etc., that are not issues in the finite case. Is this why these authors avoid it? clarifying edit: I don't need to go all the way to continuous time - just state and action spaces. Maybe one of Bertsekas's books? submitted by /u/quadprog [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have a 2 column dataset “Date” “Result”. The Result column produces a 0 or 1 for each date. I need to make a reinforcement model that will predict whether or not the next result will be a 0 or 1. It needs to be done in jupyter notebook . submitted by /u/EffectiveBug4629 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Any reinforcement learning problem can be modeled as a sequential decision problem (SDP), which can always be modeled as a Markov decision process. An example of an SDP is a multiarmed bandit problem, where the state is the vector of beliefs about the performance of each arm (or beliefs about a continuous parametric model). Decisions are made by a policy, and there are four classes of policies. For some reason, the RL community tends to focus on just one of the four classes (UCB policies, which fall in the class of cost function approximations), but there are entire communities using each of the other three classes. See chapter 7 of my new book for a complete summary of the four classes for pure learning problems (aka bandit problems). See https://tinyurl.com/RLandSO/ Curious why Sutton and Barto (2nd edition) cover bandit problems in chapter 2, and then introduce MDPs in chapter 3. A bandit problem *is* an MDP! submitted by /u/powell-sda [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hello, I'm currently learning about MDPs and machine learning. I have a few questions that might be trivial or obvious but I can't find many concrete answers online: -Are policy gradient and policy iteration similar/the same? From what I can gather, policy iteration is a type or subset of policy gradient algorithm, is this correct? -Are all policy learning methods less effective for large state spaces? From my understanding you need to use some kind of value function iteration and heursitic function for larger state spaces because you can't encounter all states enough times to converge on an optimal policy -Does convergence on a policy/value function find a local or global optimum? With neural nets, simple backpropagation may only find a local minimum for the cost function, is this true of MDP/RL iteration algorithms? Thanks!! submitted by /u/egad_a_mouse [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

In deep rl algorithm like PPO, a continuous stochastic policy is represented by Normal Distribution. For this the recommended way of creating a Normal Distribution is to get the mean by passing the state through NN and then using a state independent layer to predict log_std. This layer which predicts log_std should be trainable using backprop just like biases. So how to create this layer in tensorflow 2. submitted by /u/Better-Ad8608 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Secure and reliable data communication in optical networks is critical for high-speed Internet. However, optical fibers, serving as the data transmission medium providing connectivity to billons of users worldwide, are prone to a variety of anomalies resulting from hard failures (e.g., fiber cuts) and malicious physical attacks (e.g., optical eavesdropping (fiber tapping)) etc. Such anomalies may cause network disruption and thereby inducing huge financial and data losses, or compromise the confidentiality of optical networks by gaining unauthorized access to the carried data, or gradually degrade the network operations. Therefore, it is highly required to implement efficient anomaly detection, diagnosis, and localization schemes for enhancing the availability and reliability of optical networks. In this paper, we propose a data driven approach to accurately and quickly detect, diagnose, and localize fiber anomalies including fiber cuts, and optical eavesdropping attacks. The proposed method combines an autoencoder-based anomaly detection and an attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit algorithm, whereby the former is used for fault detection and the latter is adopted for fault diagnosis and localization once an anomaly is detected by the autoencoder. We verify the efficiency of our proposed approach by experiments under various anomaly scenarios using real operational data. The experimental results demonstrate that: (i) the autoencoder detects any fiber fault or anomaly with an F1 score of 96.86%; and (ii) the attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit algorithm identifies the the detected anomalies with an average accuracy of 98.2%, and localizes the faults with an average root mean square error of 0.19 m.  ( 2 min )

The behavior of no-regret learning algorithms is well understood in two-player min-max (i.e, zero-sum) games. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of no-regret learning in min-max games with dependent strategy sets, where the strategy of the first player constrains the behavior of the second. Such games are best understood as sequential, i.e., min-max Stackelberg, games. We consider two settings, one in which only the first player chooses their actions using a no-regret algorithm while the second player best responds, and one in which both players use no-regret algorithms. For the former case, we show that no-regret dynamics converge to a Stackelberg equilibrium. For the latter case, we introduce a new type of regret, which we call Lagrangian regret, and show that if both players minimize their Lagrangian regrets, then play converges to a Stackelberg equilibrium. We then observe that online mirror descent (OMD) dynamics in these two settings correspond respectively to a known nested (i.e., sequential) gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithm and a new simultaneous GDA-like algorithm, thereby establishing convergence of these algorithms to Stackelberg equilibrium. Finally, we analyze the robustness of OMD dynamics to perturbations by investigating online min-max Stackelberg games. We prove that OMD dynamics are robust for a large class of online min-max games with independent strategy sets. In the dependent case, we demonstrate the robustness of OMD dynamics experimentally by simulating them in online Fisher markets, a canonical example of a min-max Stackelberg game with dependent strategy sets.  ( 2 min )

The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of a maximum logit score OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, in contrast to other forms of distribution shift also considered in related sub-fields, such as out-of-distribution detection. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Project Page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/osr/  ( 2 min )

Many problems in engineering and statistics involve both predictive forecasting and decision-based optimization. Traditionally, predictive models are optimized independently from the final decision-based optimization problem. In contrast, a `smart, predict then optimize' (SPO) framework optimizes prediction models to explicitly minimize the final downstream decision loss. In this paper we present dboost, a gradient boosting algorithm for training prediction model ensembles to minimize decision regret. The dboost framework supports any convex optimization program that can be cast as convex quadratic cone program and gradient boosting is performed by implicit differentiation of a custom fixed-point mapping. To our knowledge, the dboost framework is the first general purpose implementation of gradient boosting to predict and optimize problems. Experimental results comparing with state-of-the-art SPO methods show that dboost can further reduce out-of-sample decision regret.  ( 2 min )

We introduce YOLO-pose, a novel heatmap-free approach for joint detection, and 2D multi-person pose estimation in an image based on the popular YOLO object detection framework. Existing heatmap based two-stage approaches are sub-optimal as they are not end-to-end trainable and training relies on a surrogate L1 loss that is not equivalent to maximizing the evaluation metric, i.e. Object Keypoint Similarity (OKS). Our framework allows us to train the model end-to-end and optimize the OKS metric itself. The proposed model learns to jointly detect bounding boxes for multiple persons and their corresponding 2D poses in a single forward pass and thus bringing in the best of both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Proposed approach doesn't require the postprocessing of bottom-up approaches to group detected keypoints into a skeleton as each bounding box has an associated pose, resulting in an inherent grouping of the keypoints. Unlike top-down approaches, multiple forward passes are done away with since all persons are localized along with their pose in a single inference. YOLO-pose achieves new state-of-the-art results on COCO validation (90.2% AP50) and test-dev set (90.3% AP50), surpassing all existing bottom-up approaches in a single forward pass without flip test, multi-scale testing, or any other test time augmentation. All experiments and results reported in this paper are without any test time augmentation, unlike traditional approaches that use flip-test and multi-scale testing to boost performance. Our training codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/TexasInstruments/edgeai-yolov5 and https://github.com/TexasInstruments/edgeai-yolox  ( 2 min )

For the 2D laser-based tasks, e.g., people detection and people tracking, leg detection is usually the first step. Thus, it carries great weight in determining the performance of people detection and people tracking. However, many leg detectors ignore the inevitable noise and the multiscale characteristics of the laser scan, which makes them sensitive to the unreliable features of point cloud and further degrades the performance of the leg detector. In this paper, we propose a multiscale adaptive-switch Random Forest (MARF) to overcome these two challenges. Firstly, the adaptive-switch decision tree is designed to use noisesensitive features to conduct weighted classification and noiseinvariant features to conduct binary classification, which makes our detector perform more robust to noise. Secondly, considering the multiscale property that the sparsity of the 2D point cloud is proportional to the length of laser beams, we design a multiscale random forest structure to detect legs at different distances. Moreover, the proposed approach allows us to discover a sparser human leg from point clouds than others. Consequently, our method shows an improved performance compared to other state-of-the-art leg detectors on the challenging Moving Legs dataset and retains the whole pipeline at a speed of 60+ FPS on lowcomputational laptops. Moreover, we further apply the proposed MARF to the people detection and tracking system, achieving a considerable gain in all metrics.  ( 2 min )

Vision Transformers (ViTs) take all the image patches as tokens and construct multi-head self-attention (MHSA) among them. Complete leverage of these image tokens brings redundant computations since not all the tokens are attentive in MHSA. Examples include that tokens containing semantically meaningless or distractive image backgrounds do not positively contribute to the ViT predictions. In this work, we propose to reorganize image tokens during the feed-forward process of ViT models, which is integrated into ViT during training. For each forward inference, we identify the attentive image tokens between MHSA and FFN (i.e., feed-forward network) modules, which is guided by the corresponding class token attention. Then, we reorganize image tokens by preserving attentive image tokens and fusing inattentive ones to expedite subsequent MHSA and FFN computations. To this end, our method EViT improves ViTs from two perspectives. First, under the same amount of input image tokens, our method reduces MHSA and FFN computation for efficient inference. For instance, the inference speed of DeiT-S is increased by 50% while its recognition accuracy is decreased by only 0.3% for ImageNet classification. Second, by maintaining the same computational cost, our method empowers ViTs to take more image tokens as input for recognition accuracy improvement, where the image tokens are from higher resolution images. An example is that we improve the recognition accuracy of DeiT-S by 1% for ImageNet classification at the same computational cost of a vanilla DeiT-S. Meanwhile, our method does not introduce more parameters to ViTs. Experiments on the standard benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/youweiliang/evit  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of learning the energy disaggregation signals for residential load data. Such task is referred as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), and in order to find individual devices' power consumption profiles based on aggregated meter measurements, a machine learning model is usually trained based on large amount of training data coming from a number of residential homes. Yet collecting such residential load datasets require both huge efforts and customers' approval on sharing metering data, while load data coming from different regions or electricity users may exhibit heterogeneous usage patterns. Both practical concerns make training a single, centralized NILM model challenging. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and task-adaptive learning scheme for NILM tasks, where nested meta learning and federated learning steps are designed for learning task-specific models collectively. Simulation results on benchmark dataset validate proposed algorithm's performance on efficiently inferring appliance-level consumption for a variety of homes and appliances.  ( 2 min )

In artificial neural networks, understanding the contributions of input features on the prediction fosters model explainability and delivers relevant information about the dataset. While typical setups for feature importance ranking assess input features individually, in this study, we go one step further and rank the importance of groups of features, denoted as feature-blocks. A feature-block can contain features of a specific type or features derived from a particular source, which are presented to the neural network in separate input branches (multiblock ANNs). This work presents three methods pursuing distinct strategies to rank features in multiblock ANNs by their importance: (1) a composite strategy building on individual feature importance rankings, (2) a knock-in, and (3) a knock-out strategy. While the composite strategy builds on state-of-the-art feature importance rankings, knock-in and knock-out strategies evaluate the block as a whole via a mutual information criterion. Our experiments consist of a simulation study validating all three approaches, followed by a case study on two distinct real-world datasets to compare the strategies. We conclude that each strategy has its merits for specific application scenarios.  ( 2 min )

Previous security research efforts orbiting around graphs have been exclusively focusing on either (de-)anonymizing the graphs or understanding the security and privacy issues of graph neural networks. Little attention has been paid to understand the privacy risks of integrating the output from graph embedding models (e.g., node embeddings) with complex downstream machine learning pipelines. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a novel model-agnostic graph recovery attack that exploits the implicit graph structural information preserved in the embeddings of graph nodes. We show that an adversary can recover edges with decent accuracy by only gaining access to the node embedding matrix of the original graph without interactions with the node embedding models. We demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our graph recovery attack through extensive experiments.  ( 2 min )

Multiscale topology optimization (M-TO) entails generating an optimal global topology, and an optimal set of microstructures at a smaller scale, for a physics-constrained problem. With the advent of additive manufacturing, M-TO has gained significant prominence. However, generating optimal microstructures at various locations can be computationally very expensive. As an alternate, graded multiscale topology optimization (GM-TO) has been proposed where one or more pre-selected and graded (parameterized) microstructural topologies are used to fill the domain optimally. This leads to a significant reduction in computation while retaining many of the benefits of M-TO. A successful GM-TO framework must: (1) be capable of efficiently handling numerous pre-selected microstructures, (2) be able to continuously switch between these microstructures during optimization, (3) ensure that the partition of unity is satisfied, and (4) discourage microstructure mixing at termination. In this paper, we propose to meet these requirements by exploiting the unique classification capacity of neural networks. Specifically, we propose a graded multiscale topology optimization using neural-network (GM-TOuNN) framework with the following features: (1) the number of design variables is only weakly dependent on the number of pre-selected microstructures, (2) it guarantees partition of unity while discouraging microstructure mixing, and (3) it supports automatic differentiation, thereby eliminating manual sensitivity analysis. The proposed framework is illustrated through several examples.  ( 2 min )

Purpose: (1) To assess the performance of geometric deep learning (PointNet) in diagnosing glaucoma from a single optical coherence tomography (OCT) 3D scan of the optic nerve head (ONH); (2) To compare its performance to that obtained with a standard 3D convolutional neural network (CNN), and with a gold-standard glaucoma parameter, i.e. retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness. Methods: 3D raster scans of the ONH were acquired with Spectralis OCT for 477 glaucoma and 2,296 non-glaucoma subjects at the Singapore National Eye Centre. All volumes were automatically segmented using deep learning to identify 7 major neural and connective tissues including the RNFL, the prelamina, and the lamina cribrosa (LC). Each ONH was then represented as a 3D point cloud with 1,000 points chosen randomly from all tissue boundaries. To simplify the problem, all ONH point clouds were aligned with respect to the plane and center of Bruch's membrane opening. Geometric deep learning (PointNet) was then used to provide a glaucoma diagnosis from a single OCT point cloud. The performance of our approach was compared to that obtained with a 3D CNN, and with RNFL thickness. Results: PointNet was able to provide a robust glaucoma diagnosis solely from the ONH represented as a 3D point cloud (AUC=95%). The performance of PointNet was superior to that obtained with a standard 3D CNN (AUC=87%) and with that obtained from RNFL thickness alone (AUC=80%). Discussion: We provide a proof-of-principle for the application of geometric deep learning in the field of glaucoma. Our technique requires significantly less information as input to perform better than a 3D CNN, and with an AUC superior to that obtained from RNFL thickness alone. Geometric deep learning may have wide applicability in the field of Ophthalmology.  ( 2 min )

Sampling biases in training data are a major source of algorithmic biases in machine learning systems. Although there are many methods that attempt to mitigate such algorithmic biases during training, the most direct and obvious way is simply collecting more representative training data. In this paper, we consider the task of assembling a training dataset in which minority groups are adequately represented from a given set of data sources. In essence, this is an adaptive sampling problem to determine if a given point lies in the convex hull of the means from a set of unknown distributions. We present adaptive sampling methods to determine, with high confidence, whether it is possible to assemble a representative dataset from the given data sources. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our policies in simulations in the Bernoulli and a multinomial setting.  ( 2 min )

Word embedding systems such as Word2Vec and GloVe are well-known in deep learning approaches to NLP. This is largely due to their ability to capture semantic relationships between words. In this work we investigated their usefulness in capturing rhythmic similarity of words instead. The results show that vectors these embeddings assign to rhyming words are more similar to each other, compared to the other words. It is also revealed that GloVe performs relatively better than Word2Vec in this regard. We also proposed a first of its kind metric for quantifying rhythmic similarity of a pair of words.  ( 2 min )

Mapping the connectome of the human brain using structural or functional connectivity has become one of the most pervasive paradigms for neuroimaging analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) motivated from geometric deep learning have attracted broad interest due to their established power for modeling complex networked data. Despite their established performance in other fields, there has not yet been a systematic study of how to design effective GNNs for brain network analysis. To bridge this gap, we present BrainGB, a benchmark for brain network analysis with GNNs. BrainGB standardizes the process by 1) summarizing brain network construction pipelines for both functional and structural neuroimaging modalities and 2) modularizing the implementation of GNN designs. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets across cohorts and modalities and recommend a set of general recipes for effective GNN designs on brain networks. To support open and reproducible research on GNN-based brain network analysis, we also host the BrainGB website at https:// brainnet.us/ with models, tutorials, examples, as well as an out-of-box Python package. We hope that this work will provide useful empirical evidence and offer insights for future research in this novel and promising direction.  ( 2 min )

Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent problems such as local minima and exploding/vanishing numerical gradients prevent these methods from being generally applied to control tasks with complex contact-rich dynamics, such as humanoid locomotion in classical RL benchmarks. In this work we present a high-performance differentiable simulator and a new policy learning algorithm (SHAC) that can effectively leverage simulation gradients, even in the presence of non-smoothness. Our learning algorithm alleviates problems with local minima through a smooth critic function, avoids vanishing/exploding gradients through a truncated learning window, and allows many physical environments to be run in parallel. We evaluate our method on classical RL control tasks, and show substantial improvements in sample efficiency and wall-clock time over state-of-the-art RL and differentiable simulation-based algorithms. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of our method by applying it to the challenging high-dimensional problem of muscle-actuated locomotion with a large action space, achieving a greater than 17x reduction in training time over the best-performing established RL algorithm.  ( 2 min )

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retailing to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings -- vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words -- through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word "positive" typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient is tested positive for a disease. Intuitively, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings/usages. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our estimator, proving that it can achieve the same accuracy (compared to not transfer learning) with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.  ( 2 min )

Within the context of review analytics, aspects are the features of products and services at which customers target their opinions and sentiments. Aspect detection helps product owners and service providers to identify shortcomings and prioritize customers' needs, and hence, maintain revenues and mitigate customer churn. Existing methods focus on detecting the surface form of an aspect by training supervised learning methods that fall short when aspects are latent in reviews. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to extract latent occurrences of aspects. Specifically, we assume that a customer undergoes a two-stage hypothetical generative process when writing a review: (1) deciding on an aspect amongst the set of aspects available for the product or service, and (2) writing the opinion words that are more interrelated to the chosen aspect from the set of all words available in a language. We employ latent Dirichlet allocation to learn the latent aspects distributions for generating the reviews. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed method is able to improve the state of the art when the aspects are latent with no surface form in reviews.  ( 2 min )

We present Neighborhood Attention Transformer (NAT), an efficient, accurate and scalable hierarchical transformer that works well on both image classification and downstream vision tasks. It is built upon Neighborhood Attention (NA), a simple and flexible attention mechanism that localizes the receptive field for each query to its nearest neighboring pixels. NA is a localization of self-attention, and approaches it as the receptive field size increases. It is also equivalent in FLOPs and memory usage to Swin Transformer's shifted window attention given the same receptive field size, while being less constrained. Furthermore, NA includes local inductive biases, which eliminate the need for extra operations such as pixel shifts. Experimental results on NAT are competitive; NAT-Tiny reaches 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 4.3 GFLOPs and 28M parameters, 51.4% mAP on MS-COCO and 48.4% mIoU on ADE20k. We will open-source our checkpoints, training script, configurations, and our CUDA kernel at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Neighborhood-Attention-Transformer .  ( 2 min )

We introduce NSEdit (neural-symbolic edit), a novel Transformer-based code repair method. Given only the source code that contains bugs, NSEdit predicts an editing sequence that can fix the bugs. The edit grammar is formulated as a regular language, and the Transformer uses it as a neural-symbolic scripting interface to generate editing programs. We modify the Transformer and add a pointer network to select the edit locations. An ensemble of rerankers are trained to re-rank the editing sequences generated by beam search. We fine-tune the rerankers on the validation set to reduce over-fitting. NSEdit is evaluated on various code repair datasets and achieved a new state-of-the-art accuracy ($24.04\%$) on the Tufano small dataset of the CodeXGLUE benchmark. NSEdit performs robustly when programs vary from packages to packages and when buggy programs are concrete. We conduct detailed analysis on our methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.  ( 2 min )

To reduce operation-and-maintenance expenses (OPEX) and to ensure optical network survivability, optical network operators need to detect and diagnose faults in a timely manner and with high accuracy. With the rapid advancement of telemetry technology and data analysis techniques, data-driven approaches leveraging telemetry data to tackle the fault diagnosis problem have been gaining popularity due to their quick implementation and deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) to detect, locate, and estimate the reflectance of fiber reflective faults (events) including the connectors and the mechanical splices by extracting insights from monitored data obtained by the optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) principle commonly used for troubleshooting of fiber optic cables or links. The experimental results prove that the proposed method: (i) achieves a good detection capability and high localization accuracy within short measurement time even for low SNR values; and (ii) outperforms conventionally employed techniques.

Recurrent neural networks are a powerful means to cope with time series. We show how linear, i.e., linearly activated recurrent neural networks (LRNNs) can approximate any time-dependent function f(t) given by a number of function values. The approximation can effectively be learned by simply solving a linear equation system; no backpropagation or similar methods are needed. Furthermore, the size of an LRNN can be reduced significantly in one step, after inspecting the eigenvalues of the network transition matrix, by taking only the most relevant components. Therefore, in contrast to others, we do not only learn network weights but also the network architecture. LRNNs have interesting properties: They end up in ellipse trajectories in the long run and allow the prediction of further values and compact representations of functions. We demonstrate this by several experiments, among them multiple superimposed oscillators (MSO), robotic soccer, and predicting stock prices. LRNNs outperform the previous state-of-the-art for the MSO task with a minimal number of units.  ( 2 min )

Graph neural networks (GNN) are very popular methods in machine learning and have been applied very successfully to the prediction of the properties of molecules and materials. First-order GNNs are well known to be incomplete, i.e., there exist graphs that are distinct but appear identical when seen through the lens of the GNN. More complicated schemes have thus been designed to increase their resolving power. Applications to molecules (and more generally, point clouds), however, add a geometric dimension to the problem. The most straightforward and prevalent approach to construct graph representation for molecules regards atoms as vertices in a graph and draws a bond between each pair of atoms within a chosen cutoff. Bonds can be decorated with the distance between atoms, and the resulting "distance graph NNs" (dGNN) have empirically demonstrated excellent resolving power and are widely used in chemical ML, with all known indistinguishable graphs being resolved in the fully-connected limit. Here we show that even for the restricted case of fully-connected graphs induced by 3D atom clouds dGNNs are not complete. We construct pairs of distinct point clouds that generate graphs that, for any cutoff radius, are equivalent based on a first-order Weisfeiler-Lehman test. This class of degenerate structures includes chemically-plausible configurations, setting an ultimate limit to the expressive power of some of the well-established GNN architectures for atomistic machine learning. Models that explicitly use angular or directional information in the description of atomic environments can resolve these degeneracies.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning methods have become very popular for the processing of natural images, and were then successfully adapted to the neuroimaging field. As these methods are non-transparent, interpretability methods are needed to validate them and ensure their reliability. Indeed, it has been shown that deep learning models may obtain high performance even when using irrelevant features, by exploiting biases in the training set. Such undesirable situations can potentially be detected by using interpretability methods. Recently, many methods have been proposed to interpret neural networks. However, this domain is not mature yet. Machine learning users face two major issues when aiming to interpret their models: which method to choose, and how to assess its reliability? Here, we aim at providing answers to these questions by presenting the most common interpretability methods and metrics developed to assess their reliability, as well as their applications and benchmarks in the neuroimaging context. Note that this is not an exhaustive survey: we aimed to focus on the studies which we found to be the most representative and relevant.  ( 2 min )

High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers and cloud providers support an increasingly diverse set of applications on heterogenous hardware. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads have become an increasingly larger share of the compute workloads, new approaches to optimized resource usage, allocation, and deployment of new AI frameworks are needed. By identifying compute workloads and their utilization characteristics, HPC systems may be able to better match available resources with the application demand. By leveraging datacenter instrumentation, it may be possible to develop AI-based approaches that can identify workloads and provide feedback to researchers and datacenter operators for improving operational efficiency. To enable this research, we released the MIT Supercloud Dataset, which provides detailed monitoring logs from the MIT Supercloud cluster. This dataset includes CPU and GPU usage by jobs, memory usage, and file system logs. In this paper, we present a workload classification challenge based on this dataset. We introduce a labelled dataset that can be used to develop new approaches to workload classification and present initial results based on existing approaches. The goal of this challenge is to foster algorithmic innovations in the analysis of compute workloads that can achieve higher accuracy than existing methods. Data and code will be made publicly available via the Datacenter Challenge website : https://dcc.mit.edu.  ( 2 min )

Understanding and controlling latent representations in deep generative models is a challenging yet important problem for analyzing, transforming and generating various types of data. In speech processing, inspiring from the anatomical mechanisms of phonation, the source-filter model considers that speech signals are produced from a few independent and physically meaningful continuous latent factors, among which the fundamental frequency $f_0$ and the formants are of primary importance. In this work, we show that the source-filter model of speech production naturally arises in the latent space of a variational autoencoder (VAE) trained in an unsupervised manner on a dataset of natural speech signals. Using only a few seconds of labeled speech signals generated with an artificial speech synthesizer, we experimentally illustrate that $f_0$ and the formant frequencies are encoded in orthogonal subspaces of the VAE latent space and we develop a weakly-supervised method to accurately and independently control these speech factors of variation within the learned latent subspaces. Without requiring additional information such as text or human-labeled data, this results in a deep generative model of speech spectrograms that is conditioned on $f_0$ and the formant frequencies, and which is applied to the transformation of speech signals.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we propose a graph neural network architecture solving the AC power flow problem under realistic constraints. While the energy transition is changing the energy industry to a digitalized and decentralized energy system, the challenges are increasingly shifting to the distribution grid level to integrate new loads and generation technologies. To ensure a save and resilient operation of distribution grids, AC power flow calculations are the means of choice to determine grid operating limits or analyze grid asset utilization in planning procedures. In our approach we demonstrate the development of a framework which makes use of graph neural networks to learn the physical constraints of the power flow. We present our model architecture on which we perform unsupervised training to learn a general solution of the AC power flow formulation that is independent of the specific topologies and supply tasks used for training. Finally, we demonstrate, validate and discuss our results on medium voltage benchmark grids.  ( 2 min )

Computational models starting from large ensembles of evolutionarily related protein sequences capture a representation of protein families and learn constraints associated to protein structure and function. They thus open the possibility for generating novel sequences belonging to protein families. Protein language models trained on multiple sequence alignments, such as MSA Transformer, are highly attractive candidates to this end. We propose and test an iterative method that directly uses the masked language modeling objective to generate sequences using MSA Transformer. We demonstrate that the resulting sequences generally score better than those generated by Potts models, and even than natural sequences, for homology, coevolution and structure-based measures. Moreover, MSA Transformer better reproduces the higher-order statistics and the distribution of sequences in sequence space of natural data than Potts models, although Potts models better reproduce first- and second-order statistics. MSA Transformer is thus a strong candidate for protein sequence generation and protein design.

The matrix completion problem has been studied broadly under many underlying conditions. The problem has been explored under adaptive or non-adaptive, exact or estimation, single-phase or multi-phase, and many other categories. In most of these cases, the observation cost of each entry is uniform and has the same cost across the columns. However, in many real-life scenarios, we could expect elements from distinct columns or distinct positions to have a different cost. In this paper, we explore this generalization under adaptive conditions. We approach the problem under two different cost models. The first one is that entries from different columns have different observation costs, but, within the same column, each entry has a uniform cost. The second one is any two entry has different observation cost, despite being the same or different columns. We provide complexity analysis of our algorithms and provide tightness guarantees.

Automatic Music Transcription, which consists in transforming an audio recording of a musical performance into symbolic format, remains a difficult Music Information Retrieval task. In this work, which focuses on piano transcription, we propose a semi-supervised approach using low-rank matrix factorization techniques, in particular Convolutive Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. In the semi-supervised setting, only a single recording of each individual notes is required. We show on the MAPS dataset that the proposed semi-supervised CNMF method performs better than state-of-the-art low-rank factorization techniques and a little worse than supervised deep learning state-of-the-art methods, while however suffering from generalization issues.

Federated learning (FL) is a new artificial intelligence concept that enables Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to learn a collaborative model without sending the raw data to centralized nodes for processing. Despite numerous advantages, low computing resources at IoT devices and high communication costs for exchanging model parameters make applications of FL in massive IoT networks very limited. In this work, we develop a novel compression scheme for FL, called high-compression federated learning (HCFL), for very large scale IoT networks. HCFL can reduce the data load for FL processes without changing their structure and hyperparameters. In this way, we not only can significantly reduce communication costs, but also make intensive learning processes more adaptable on low-computing resource IoT devices. Furthermore, we investigate a relationship between the number of IoT devices and the convergence level of the FL model and thereby better assess the quality of the FL process. We demonstrate our HCFL scheme in both simulations and mathematical analyses. Our proposed theoretical research can be used as a minimum level of satisfaction, proving that the FL process can achieve good performance when a determined configuration is met. Therefore, we show that HCFL is applicable in any FL-integrated networks with numerous IoT devices.

In this paper we analyze the effect of a policy recommendation on the performances of an artificial interbank market. Financial institutions stipulate lending agreements following a public recommendation and their individual information. The former, modeled by a reinforcement learning optimal policy trying to maximize the long term fitness of the system, gathers information on the economic environment and directs economic actors to create credit relationships based on the optimal choice between a low interest rate or high liquidity supply. The latter, based on the agents' balance sheet, allows to determine the liquidity supply and interest rate that the banks optimally offer on the market. Based on the combination between the public and the private signal, financial institutions create or cut their credit connections over time via a preferential attachment evolving procedure able to generate a dynamic network. Our results show that the emergence of a core-periphery interbank network, combined with a certain level of homogeneity on the size of lenders and borrowers, are essential features to ensure the resilience of the system. Moreover, the reinforcement learning optimal policy recommendation plays a crucial role in mitigating systemic risk with respect to alternative policy instruments.

Medical image data are usually imbalanced across different classes. One-class classification has attracted increasing attention to address the data imbalance problem by distinguishing the samples of the minority class from the majority class. Previous methods generally aim to either learn a new feature space to map training samples together or to fit training samples by autoencoder-like models. These methods mainly focus on capturing either compact or descriptive features, where the information of the samples of a given one class is not sufficiently utilized. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based method to learn compact features by adding constraints on the bottleneck features, and to preserve descriptive features by training an autoencoder at the same time. Through jointly optimizing the constraining loss and the autoencoder's reconstruction loss, our method can learn more relevant features associated with the given class, making the majority and minority samples more distinguishable. Experimental results on three clinical datasets (including the MRI breast images, FFDM breast images and chest X-ray images) obtains state-of-art performance compared to previous methods.

To improve predictive models for STEM applications, supplemental physics-based features computed from input parameters are introduced into single and multiple layers of a deep neural network (DNN). While many studies focus on informing DNNs with physics through differential equations or numerical simulation, much may be gained through integration of simplified relationships. To evaluate this hypothesis, a number of thin rectangular plates simply-supported on all edges are simulated for five materials. With plate dimensions and material properties as input features and fundamental natural frequency as the sole output, predictive performance of a purely data-driven DNN-based model is compared with models using additional inputs computed from simplified physical relationships among baseline parameters, namely plate weight, modulus of rigidity, and shear modulus. To better understand the benefit to model accuracy, these additional features are injected into various single and multiple DNN layers, and trained with four different dataset sizes. When these physics-enhanced models are evaluated against independent data of the same materials and similar dimensions to the training sets, supplementation with simplified physics-based parameters provides little reduction in prediction error over the baseline for models trained with dataset sizes of 60 and greater, although small improvement from 19.3% to 16.1% occurs when trained with a sparse size of 30. Conversely, notable accuracy gains occur when the independent test data is of material and dimensions not conforming to the training set. Specifically, when physics-enhanced data is injected into multiple DNN layers, reductions in error from 33.2% to 19.6%, 34.9% to 19.9%, 35.8% to 22.4%, and 43.0% to 28.4% are achieved for training dataset sizes of 261, 117, 60, and 30, respectively, demonstrating attainment of a degree of generalizability.

Progress in 3D object understanding has relied on manually canonicalized shape datasets that contain instances with consistent position and orientation (3D pose). This has made it hard to generalize these methods to in-the-wild shapes, eg., from internet model collections or depth sensors. ConDor is a self-supervised method that learns to Canonicalize the 3D orientation and position for full and partial 3D point clouds. We build on top of Tensor Field Networks (TFNs), a class of permutation- and rotation-equivariant, and translation-invariant 3D networks. During inference, our method takes an unseen full or partial 3D point cloud at an arbitrary pose and outputs an equivariant canonical pose. During training, this network uses self-supervision losses to learn the canonical pose from an un-canonicalized collection of full and partial 3D point clouds. ConDor can also learn to consistently co-segment object parts without any supervision. Extensive quantitative results on four new metrics show that our approach outperforms existing methods while enabling new applications such as operation on depth images and annotation transfer.

The spectra of random feature matrices provide essential information on the conditioning of the linear system used in random feature regression problems and are thus connected to the consistency and generalization of random feature models. Random feature matrices are asymmetric rectangular nonlinear matrices depending on two input variables, the data and the weights, which can make their characterization challenging. We consider two settings for the two input variables, either both are random variables or one is a random variable and the other is well-separated, i.e. there is a minimum distance between points. With conditions on the dimension, the complexity ratio, and the sampling variance, we show that the singular values of these matrices concentrate near their full expectation and near one with high-probability. In particular, since the dimension depends only on the logarithm of the number of random weights or the number of data points, our complexity bounds can be achieved even in moderate dimensions for many practical setting. The theoretical results are verified with numerical experiments.

The research paper addresses linear decomposition of time series of non-additive metrics that allows for the identification and interpretation of contributing factors (input features) of variance. Non-additive metrics, such as ratios, are widely used in a variety of domains. It commonly requires preceding aggregations of underlying variables that are used to calculate the metric of interest. The latest poses a dimensionality challenge when the input features and underlying variables are formed as two-dimensional arrays along elements, such as account or customer identifications, and time points. It rules out direct modeling of the time series of a non-additive metric as a function of input features. The article discusses a five-step approach: (1) segmentations of input features and the underlying variables of the metric that are supported by unsupervised autoencoders, (2) univariate or joint fittings of the metric by the aggregated input features on the segmented domains, (3) transformations of pre-screened input features according to the fitted models, (4) aggregation of the transformed features as time series, and (5) modelling of the metric time series as a sum of constrained linear effects of the aggregated features. Alternatively, approximation by numerical differentiation has been considered to linearize the metric. It allows for element level univariate or joint modeling of step (2). The process of these analytical steps allows for a backward-looking explanatory decomposition of the metric as a sum of time series of the survived input features. The paper includes a synthetic example that studies loss-to-balance monthly rates of a hypothetical retail credit portfolio. To validate that no latent factors other than the survived input features have significant impacts on the metric, Statistical Process Control has been introduced for the residual time series.

We present an end-to-end reconstruction algorithm to build particle candidates from detector hits in next-generation granular calorimeters similar to that foreseen for the high-luminosity upgrade of the CMS detector. The algorithm exploits a distance-weighted graph neural network, trained with object condensation, a graph segmentation technique. Through a single-shot approach, the reconstruction task is paired with energy regression. We describe the reconstruction performance in terms of efficiency as well as in terms of energy resolution. In addition, we show the jet reconstruction performance of our method and discuss its inference computational cost. To our knowledge, this work is the first-ever example of single-shot calorimetric reconstruction of ${\cal O}(1000)$ particles in high-luminosity conditions with 200 pileup.

With the availability of data, hardware, software ecosystem and relevant skill sets, the machine learning community is undergoing a rapid development with new architectures and approaches appearing at high frequency every year. In this article, we conduct an exemplary image classification study in order to demonstrate how confidence intervals around accuracy measurements can greatly enhance the communication of research results as well as impact the reviewing process. In addition, we explore the hallmarks and limitations of this approximation. We discuss the relevance of this approach reflecting on a spotlight publication of ICLR22. A reproducible workflow is made available as an open-source adjoint to this publication. Based on our discussion, we make suggestions for improving the authoring and reviewing process of machine learning articles.

Many applications of representation learning, such as privacy-preservation, algorithmic fairness, and domain adaptation, desire explicit control over semantic information being discarded. This goal is formulated as satisfying two objectives: maximizing utility for predicting a target attribute while simultaneously being independent or invariant with respect to a known semantic attribute. Solutions to such problems lead to trade-offs between the two objectives when they are competing with each other. While existing works study bounds on these trade-offs, three questions still remain outstanding: \emph{What are the exact fundamental trade-offs between utility and invariance?}, 2) \emph{What is the optimal dimensionality of the representation?}, and 3) \emph{What are the encoders (mapping data to a representation) that achieve the exact fundamental trade-offs and how can we estimate them from data?} This paper addresses these questions. We adopt a functional analysis perspective and derive closed-form solutions for the global optima of the underlying optimization problems under mild assumptions, which in turn yields closed formulae for the exact trade-offs, optimal representation dimensionality, and the corresponding encoders. We also numerically quantify the trade-offs on representative problems and compare them to those achieved by baseline invariant representation learning algorithms.

Videos show continuous events, yet most $-$ if not all $-$ video synthesis frameworks treat them discretely in time. In this work, we think of videos of what they should be $-$ time-continuous signals, and extend the paradigm of neural representations to build a continuous-time video generator. For this, we first design continuous motion representations through the lens of positional embeddings. Then, we explore the question of training on very sparse videos and demonstrate that a good generator can be learned by using as few as 2 frames per clip. After that, we rethink the traditional image + video discriminators pair and design a holistic discriminator that aggregates temporal information by simply concatenating frames' features. This decreases the training cost and provides richer learning signal to the generator, making it possible to train directly on 1024$^2$ videos for the first time. We build our model on top of StyleGAN2 and it is just ${\approx}5\%$ more expensive to train at the same resolution while achieving almost the same image quality. Moreover, our latent space features similar properties, enabling spatial manipulations that our method can propagate in time. We can generate arbitrarily long videos at arbitrary high frame rate, while prior work struggles to generate even 64 frames at a fixed rate. Our model is tested on four modern 256$^2$ and one 1024$^2$-resolution video synthesis benchmarks. In terms of sheer metrics, it performs on average ${\approx}30\%$ better than the closest runner-up. Project website: https://universome.github.io.

We introduce kernel thinning, a new procedure for compressing a distribution $\mathbb{P}$ more effectively than i.i.d. sampling or standard thinning. Given a suitable reproducing kernel $\mathbf{k}$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time, kernel thinning compresses an $n$-point approximation to $\mathbb{P}$ into a $\sqrt{n}$-point approximation with comparable worst-case integration error across the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. With high probability, the maximum discrepancy in integration error is $\mathcal{O}_d(n^{-1/2}\sqrt{\log n})$ for compactly supported $\mathbb{P}$ and $\mathcal{O}_d(n^{-\frac{1}{2}} (\log n)^{(d+1)/2}\sqrt{\log\log n})$ for sub-exponential $\mathbb{P}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In contrast, an equal-sized i.i.d. sample from $\mathbb{P}$ suffers $\Omega(n^{-1/4})$ integration error. Our sub-exponential guarantees resemble the classical quasi-Monte Carlo error rates for uniform $\mathbb{P}$ on $[0,1]^d$ but apply to general distributions on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and a wide range of common kernels. We use our results to derive explicit non-asymptotic maximum mean discrepancy bounds for Gaussian, Mat\'ern, and B-spline kernels and present two vignettes illustrating the practical benefits of kernel thinning over i.i.d. sampling and standard Markov chain Monte Carlo thinning, in dimensions $d=2$ through $100$.

Refractory epileptic patients can suffer a seizure at any moment. Seizure prediction would substantially improve their lives. In this work, based on scalp EEG and its transformation into images, the likelihood of an epileptic seizure occurring at any moment is computed using an average of the softmax layer output (the likelihood) of a CNN, instead of the output of the classification layer. Results show that by analyzing the likelihood and thresholding it, prediction has higher sensitivity or a lower FPR/h. The best threshold for the likelihood was higher than 50% for 5 patients, and was lower for the remaining 36. However, more testing is needed, especially in new seizures, to better assess the real performance of this method. This work is a proof of concept with a positive outlook.

Spectral geometric methods have brought revolutionary changes to the field of geometry processing. Of particular interest is the study of the Laplacian spectrum as a compact, isometry and permutation-invariant representation of a shape. Some recent works show how the intrinsic geometry of a full shape can be recovered from its spectrum, but there are approaches that consider the more challenging problem of recovering the geometry from the spectral information of partial shapes. In this paper, we propose a possible way to fill this gap. We introduce a learning-based method to estimate the Laplacian spectrum of the union of partial non-rigid 3D shapes, without actually computing the 3D geometry of the union or any correspondence between those partial shapes. We do so by operating purely in the spectral domain and by defining the union operation between short sequences of eigenvalues. We show that the approximated union spectrum can be used as-is to reconstruct the complete geometry [MRC*19], perform region localization on a template [RTO*19] and retrieve shapes from a database, generalizing ShapeDNA [RWP06] to work with partialities. Working with eigenvalues allows us to deal with unknown correspondence, different sampling, and different discretizations (point clouds and meshes alike), making this operation especially robust and general. Our approach is data-driven and can generalize to isometric and non-isometric deformations of the surface, as long as these stay within the same semantic class (e.g., human bodies or horses), as well as to partiality artifacts not seen at training time.

Video quality assessment is a challenging problem having a critical significance in the context of medical imaging. For instance, in laparoscopic surgery, the acquired video data suffers from different kinds of distortion that not only hinder surgery performance but also affect the execution of subsequent tasks in surgical navigation and robotic surgeries. For this reason, we propose in this paper neural network-based approaches for distortion classification as well as quality prediction. More precisely, a Residual Network (ResNet) based approach is firstly developed for simultaneous ranking and classification task. Then, this architecture is extended to make it appropriate for the quality prediction task by using an additional Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN). To train the overall architecture (ResNet and FCNN models), transfer learning and end-to-end learning approaches are investigated. Experimental results, carried out on a new laparoscopic video quality database, have shown the efficiency of the proposed methods compared to recent conventional and deep learning based approaches.

Multi-animal pose estimation is essential for studying animals' social behaviors in neuroscience and neuroethology. Advanced approaches have been proposed to support multi-animal estimation and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, these models rarely exploit unlabeled data during training even though real world applications have exponentially more unlabeled frames than labeled frames. Manually adding dense annotations for a large number of images or videos is costly and labor-intensive, especially for multiple instances. Given these deficiencies, we propose a novel semi-supervised architecture for multi-animal pose estimation, leveraging the abundant structures pervasive in unlabeled frames in behavior videos to enhance training, which is critical for sparsely-labeled problems. The resulting algorithm will provide superior multi-animal pose estimation results on three animal experiments compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and exhibits more predictive power in sparsely-labeled data regimes.

BioBERT and BioMegatron are Transformers models adapted for the biomedical domain based on publicly available biomedical corpora. As such, they have the potential to encode large-scale biological knowledge. We investigate the encoding and representation of biological knowledge in these models, and its potential utility to support inference in cancer precision medicine - namely, the interpretation of the clinical significance of genomic alterations. We compare the performance of different transformer baselines; we use probing to determine the consistency of encodings for distinct entities; and we use clustering methods to compare and contrast the internal properties of the embeddings for genes, variants, drugs and diseases. We show that these models do indeed encode biological knowledge, although some of this is lost in fine-tuning for specific tasks. Finally, we analyse how the models behave with regard to biases and imbalances in the dataset.

Raw deep neural network (DNN) performance is not enough; in real-world settings, computational load, training efficiency and adversarial security are just as or even more important. We propose to simultaneously tackle Performance, Efficiency, and Robustness, using our proposed algorithm Q-TART, Quickly Train for Adversarial Robustness and in-Transferability. Q-TART follows the intuition that samples highly susceptible to noise strongly affect the decision boundaries learned by DNNs, which in turn degrades their performance and adversarial susceptibility. By identifying and removing such samples, we demonstrate improved performance and adversarial robustness while using only a subset of the training data. Through our experiments we highlight Q-TART's high performance across multiple Dataset-DNN combinations, including ImageNet, and provide insights into the complementary behavior of Q-TART alongside existing adversarial training approaches to increase robustness by over 1.3% while using up to 17.9% less training time.

Different from handcrafted features, deep neural networks can automatically learn task-specific features from data. Due to this data-driven nature, they have achieved remarkable success in various areas. However, manual design and selection of suitable network architectures are time-consuming and require substantial effort of human experts. To address this problem, researchers have proposed neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms which can automatically generate network architectures but suffer from heavy computational cost and instability if searching from scratch. In this paper, we propose a hybrid NAS framework for ultrasound (US) image classification and segmentation. The hybrid framework consists of a pre-trained backbone and several searched cells (i.e., network building blocks), which takes advantage of the strengths of both NAS and the expert knowledge from existing convolutional neural networks. Specifically, two effective and lightweight operations, a mixed depth-wise convolution operator and a squeeze-and-excitation block, are introduced into the candidate operations to enhance the variety and capacity of the searched cells. These two operations not only decrease model parameters but also boost network performance. Moreover, we propose a re-aggregation strategy for the searched cells, aiming to further improve the performance for different vision tasks. We tested our method on two large US image datasets, including a 9-class echinococcosis dataset containing 9566 images for classification and an ovary dataset containing 3204 images for segmentation. Ablation experiments and comparison with other handcrafted or automatically searched architectures demonstrate that our method can generate more powerful and lightweight models for the above US image classification and segmentation tasks.

Deep learning models are mostly used in an offline inference fashion. However, this strongly limits the use of these models inside audio generation setups, as most creative workflows are based on real-time digital signal processing. Although approaches based on recurrent networks can be naturally adapted to this buffer-based computation, the use of convolutions still poses some serious challenges. To tackle this issue, the use of causal streaming convolutions have been proposed. However, this requires specific complexified training and can impact the resulting audio quality. In this paper, we introduce a new method allowing to produce non-causal streaming models. This allows to make any convolutional model compatible with real-time buffer-based processing. As our method is based on a post-training reconfiguration of the model, we show that it is able to transform models trained without causal constraints into a streaming model. We show how our method can be adapted to fit complex architectures with parallel branches. To evaluate our method, we apply it on the recent RAVE model, which provides high-quality real-time audio synthesis. We test our approach on multiple music and speech datasets and show that it is faster than overlap-add methods, while having no impact on the generation quality. Finally, we introduce two open-source implementation of our work as Max/MSP and PureData externals, and as a VST audio plugin. This allows to endow traditional digital audio workstation with real-time neural audio synthesis on a laptop CPU.

Purpose: The optic nerve head (ONH) undergoes complex and deep 3D morphological changes during the development and progression of glaucoma. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is the current gold standard to visualize and quantify these changes, however the resulting 3D deep-tissue information has not yet been fully exploited for the diagnosis and prognosis of glaucoma. To this end, we aimed: (1) To compare the performance of two relatively recent geometric deep learning techniques in diagnosing glaucoma from a single OCT scan of the ONH; and (2) To identify the 3D structural features of the ONH that are critical for the diagnosis of glaucoma. Methods: In this study, we included a total of 2,247 non-glaucoma and 2,259 glaucoma scans from 1,725 subjects. All subjects had their ONHs imaged in 3D with Spectralis OCT. All OCT scans were automatically segmented using deep learning to identify major neural and connective tissues. Each ONH was then represented as a 3D point cloud. We used PointNet and dynamic graph convolutional neural network (DGCNN) to diagnose glaucoma from such 3D ONH point clouds and to identify the critical 3D structural features of the ONH for glaucoma diagnosis. Results: Both the DGCNN (AUC: 0.97$\pm$0.01) and PointNet (AUC: 0.95$\pm$0.02) were able to accurately detect glaucoma from 3D ONH point clouds. The critical points formed an hourglass pattern with most of them located in the inferior and superior quadrant of the ONH. Discussion: The diagnostic accuracy of both geometric deep learning approaches was excellent. Moreover, we were able to identify the critical 3D structural features of the ONH for glaucoma diagnosis that tremendously improved the transparency and interpretability of our method. Consequently, our approach may have strong potential to be used in clinical applications for the diagnosis and prognosis of a wide range of ophthalmic disorders.

In this research, dew point temperature (DPT) is simulated using the data-driven approach. Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) is utilized as a data-driven technique to forecast this parameter at Tabriz in East Azerbaijan. Various input patterns, namely T min, T max, and T mean, are utilized for training the architecture whilst DPT is the model's output. The findings indicate that, in general, ANFIS method is capable of identifying data patterns with a high degree of accuracy. However, the approach demonstrates that processing time and computer resources may substantially increase by adding additional functions. Based on the results, the number of iterations and computing resources might change dramatically if new functionalities are included. As a result, tuning parameters have to be optimized inside the method framework. The findings demonstrate a high agreement between results by the data-driven technique (machine learning method) and the observed data. Using this prediction toolkit, DPT can be adequately forecasted solely based on the temperature distribution of Tabriz. This kind of modeling is extremely promising for predicting DPT at various sites. Besides, this study thoroughly compares the Bilayered Neural Network (BNN) and ANFIS models on various scales. Whilst the ANFIS model is extremely stable for almost all numbers of membership functions, the BNN model is highly sensitive to this scale factor to predict DPT.

Semantic parsing (SP) is a core component of modern virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While sequence-to-sequence-based auto-regressive (AR) approaches are common for conversational semantic parsing, recent studies employ non-autoregressive (NAR) decoders and reduce inference latency while maintaining competitive parsing quality. However, a major drawback of NAR decoders is the difficulty of generating top-k (i.e., k-best) outputs with approaches such as beam search. To address this challenge, we propose a novel NAR semantic parser that introduces intent conditioning on the decoder. Inspired by the traditional intent and slot tagging parsers, we decouple the top-level intent prediction from the rest of a parse. As the top-level intent largely governs the syntax and semantics of a parse, the intent conditioning allows the model to better control beam search and improves the quality and diversity of top-k outputs. We introduce a hybrid teacher-forcing approach to avoid training and inference mismatch. We evaluate the proposed NAR on conversational SP datasets, TOP & TOPv2. Like the existing NAR models, we maintain the O(1) decoding time complexity while generating more diverse outputs and improving the top-3 exact match (EM) by 2.4 points. In comparison with AR models, our model speeds up beam search inference by 6.7 times on CPU with competitive top-k EM.

Exploratory Landscape Analysis is a powerful technique for numerically characterizing landscapes of single-objective continuous optimization problems. Landscape insights are crucial both for problem understanding as well as for assessing benchmark set diversity and composition. Despite the irrefutable usefulness of these features, they suffer from their own ailments and downsides. Hence, in this work we provide a collection of different approaches to characterize optimization landscapes. Similar to conventional landscape features, we require a small initial sample. However, instead of computing features based on that sample, we develop alternative representations of the original sample. These range from point clouds to 2D images and, therefore, are entirely feature-free. We demonstrate and validate our devised methods on the BBOB testbed and predict, with the help of Deep Learning, the high-level, expert-based landscape properties such as the degree of multimodality and the existence of funnel structures. The quality of our approaches is on par with methods relying on the traditional landscape features. Thereby, we provide an exciting new perspective on every research area which utilizes problem information such as problem understanding and algorithm design as well as automated algorithm configuration and selection.

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a rigorous framework that borrows techniques from geometric and algebraic topology, category theory, and combinatorics in order to study the "shape" of such complex high-dimensional data. Research in this area has grown significantly over the last several years bringing a deeply rooted theory to bear on practical applications in areas such as genomics, natural language processing, medicine, cybersecurity, energy, and climate change. Within some of these areas, TDA has also been used to augment AI and ML techniques. We believe there is further utility to be gained in this space that can be facilitated by a workshop bringing together experts (both theorists and practitioners) and non-experts. Currently there is an active community of pure mathematicians with research interests in developing and exploring the theoretical and computational aspects of TDA. Applied mathematicians and other practitioners are also present in community but do not represent a majority. This speaks to the primary aim of this workshop which is to grow a wider community of interest in TDA. By fostering meaningful exchanges between these groups, from across the government, academia, and industry, we hope to create new synergies that can only come through building a mutual comprehensive awareness of the problem and solution spaces.

A way to overcome expensive and time-consuming manual data labeling is weak supervision - automatic annotation of data samples via a predefined set of labeling functions (LFs), rule-based mechanisms that generate potentially erroneous labels. In this work, we investigate noise reduction techniques for weak supervision based on the principle of k-fold cross-validation. In particular, we extend two frameworks for detecting the erroneous samples in manually annotated data to the weakly supervised setting. Our methods profit from leveraging the information about matching LFs and detect noisy samples more accurately. We also introduce a new algorithm for denoising the weakly annotated data called ULF, that refines the allocation of LFs to classes by estimating the reliable LFs-to-classes joint matrix. Evaluation on several datasets shows that ULF successfully improves weakly supervised learning without using any manually labeled data.

Recent studies in singing voice synthesis have achieved high-quality results leveraging advances in text-to-speech models based on deep neural networks. One of the main issues in training singing voice synthesis models is that they require melody and lyric labels to be temporally aligned with audio data. The temporal alignment is a time-exhausting manual work in preparing for the training data. To address the issue, we propose a melody-unsupervision model that requires only audio-and-lyrics pairs without temporal alignment in training time but generates singing voice audio given a melody and lyrics input in inference time. The proposed model is composed of a phoneme classifier and a singing voice generator jointly trained in an end-to-end manner. The model can be fine-tuned by adjusting the amount of supervision with temporally aligned melody labels. Through experiments in melody-unsupervision and semi-supervision settings, we compare the audio quality of synthesized singing voice. We also show that the proposed model is capable of being trained with speech audio and text labels but can generate singing voice in inference time.

In this paper we propose an unsupervised learning method to extract temporal information on monocular videos, where we detect and encode subject of interest in each frame and leverage contrastive self-supervised (CSS) learning to extract rich latent vectors. Instead of simply treating the latent features of nearby frames as positive pairs and those of temporally-distant ones as negative pairs as in other CSS approaches, we explicitly disentangle each latent vector into a time-variant component and a time-invariant one. We then show that applying CSS only to the time-variant features and encouraging a gradual transition on them between nearby and away frames while also reconstructing the input, extract rich temporal features into the time-variant component, well-suited for human pose estimation. Our approach reduces error by about 50\% compared to the standard CSS strategies, outperforms other unsupervised single-view methods and matches the performance of multi-view techniques.

We investigate the fairness concerns of training a machine learning model using data with missing values. Even though there are a number of fairness intervention methods in the literature, most of them require a complete training set as input. In practice, data can have missing values, and data missing patterns can depend on group attributes (e.g. gender or race). Simply applying off-the-shelf fair learning algorithms to an imputed dataset may lead to an unfair model. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze different sources of discrimination risks when training with an imputed dataset. Then, we propose an integrated approach based on decision trees that does not require a separate process of imputation and learning. Instead, we train a tree with missing incorporated as attribute (MIA), which does not require explicit imputation, and we optimize a fairness-regularized objective function. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing fairness intervention methods applied to an imputed dataset, through several experiments on real-world datasets.

In this work, we analyze an efficient sampling-based algorithm for general-purpose reachability analysis, which remains a notoriously challenging problem with applications ranging from neural network verification to safety analysis of dynamical systems. By sampling inputs, evaluating their images in the true reachable set, and taking their $\epsilon$-padded convex hull as a set estimator, this algorithm applies to general problem settings and is simple to implement. Our main contribution is the derivation of asymptotic and finite-sample accuracy guarantees using random set theory. This analysis informs algorithmic design to obtain an $\epsilon$-close reachable set approximation with high probability, provides insights into which reachability problems are most challenging, and motivates safety-critical applications of the technique. On a neural network verification task, we show that this approach is more accurate and significantly faster than prior work. Informed by our analysis, we also design a robust model predictive controller that we demonstrate in hardware experiments.

In black-box optimization problems, we aim to maximize an unknown objective function, where the function is only accessible through feedbacks of an evaluation or simulation oracle. In real-life, the feedbacks of such oracles are often noisy and available after some unknown delay that may depend on the computation time of the oracle. Additionally, if the exact evaluations are expensive but coarse approximations are available at a lower cost, the feedbacks can have multi-fidelity. In order to address this problem, we propose a generic extension of hierarchical optimistic tree search (HOO), called ProCrastinated Tree Search (PCTS), that flexibly accommodates a delay and noise-tolerant bandit algorithm. We provide a generic proof technique to quantify regret of PCTS under delayed, noisy, and multi-fidelity feedbacks. Specifically, we derive regret bounds of PCTS enabled with delayed-UCB1 (DUCB1) and delayed-UCB-V (DUCBV) algorithms. Given a horizon $T$, PCTS retains the regret bound of non-delayed HOO for expected delay of $O(\log T)$ and worsens by $O(T^{\frac{1-\alpha}{d+2}})$ for expected delays of $O(T^{1-\alpha})$ for $\alpha \in (0,1]$. We experimentally validate on multiple synthetic functions and hyperparameter tuning problems that PCTS outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box optimization methods for feedbacks with different noise levels, delays, and fidelity.

This paper presents the design and results of the "PEg TRAnsfert Workflow recognition" (PETRAW) challenge whose objective was to develop surgical workflow recognition methods based on one or several modalities, among video, kinematic, and segmentation data, in order to study their added value. The PETRAW challenge provided a data set of 150 peg transfer sequences performed on a virtual simulator. This data set was composed of videos, kinematics, semantic segmentation, and workflow annotations which described the sequences at three different granularity levels: phase, step, and activity. Five tasks were proposed to the participants: three of them were related to the recognition of all granularities with one of the available modalities, while the others addressed the recognition with a combination of modalities. Average application-dependent balanced accuracy (AD-Accuracy) was used as evaluation metric to take unbalanced classes into account and because it is more clinically relevant than a frame-by-frame score. Seven teams participated in at least one task and four of them in all tasks. Best results are obtained with the use of the video and the kinematics data with an AD-Accuracy between 93% and 90% for the four teams who participated in all tasks. The improvement between video/kinematic-based methods and the uni-modality ones was significant for all of the teams. However, the difference in testing execution time between the video/kinematic-based and the kinematic-based methods has to be taken into consideration. Is it relevant to spend 20 to 200 times more computing time for less than 3% of improvement? The PETRAW data set is publicly available at www.synapse.org/PETRAW to encourage further research in surgical workflow recognition.

The Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM; Tobar et al., 2015a) is a model for signals with complex spectral structure. A significant limitation of the GPCM is that it assumes a rapidly decaying spectrum: it can only model smooth signals. Moreover, inference in the GPCM currently requires (1) a mean-field assumption, resulting in poorly calibrated uncertainties, and (2) a tedious variational optimisation of large covariance matrices. We redesign the GPCM model to induce a richer distribution over the spectrum with relaxed assumptions about smoothness: the Causal Gaussian Process Convolution Model (CGPCM) introduces a causality assumption into the GPCM, and the Rough Gaussian Process Convolution Model (RGPCM) can be interpreted as a Bayesian nonparametric generalisation of the fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We also propose a more effective variational inference scheme, going beyond the mean-field assumption: we design a Gibbs sampler which directly samples from the optimal variational solution, circumventing any variational optimisation entirely. The proposed variations of the GPCM are validated in experiments on synthetic and real-world data, showing promising results.

Previous studies demonstrate DNNs' vulnerability to adversarial examples and adversarial training can establish a defense to adversarial examples. In addition, recent studies show that deep neural networks also exhibit vulnerability to parameter corruptions. The vulnerability of model parameters is of crucial value to the study of model robustness and generalization. In this work, we introduce the concept of parameter corruption and propose to leverage the loss change indicators for measuring the flatness of the loss basin and the parameter robustness of neural network parameters. On such basis, we analyze parameter corruptions and propose the multi-step adversarial corruption algorithm. To enhance neural networks, we propose the adversarial parameter defense algorithm that minimizes the average risk of multiple adversarial parameter corruptions. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve both the parameter robustness and accuracy of neural networks.

Traditional frequency based projection filters, or projection operators (PO), separate signal and noise through a series of transformations which remove frequencies where noise is present. However, this technique relies on a priori knowledge of what frequencies contain signal and noise and that these frequencies do not overlap, which is difficult to achieve in practice. To address these issues, we introduce a PO-neural network hybrid model, the Pseudo Projection Operator (PPO), which leverages a neural network to perform frequency selection. We compare the filtering capabilities of a PPO, PO, and denoising autoencoder (DAE) on the University of Rochester Multi-Modal Music Performance Dataset with a variety of added noise types. In the majority of experiments, the PPO outperforms both the PO and DAE. Based upon these results, we suggest future application of the PPO to filtering problems in the physical and biological sciences.

Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees. First, we show how to plant a backdoor in any model, using digital signature schemes. The construction guarantees that given black-box access to the original model and the backdoored version, it is computationally infeasible to find even a single input where they differ. This property implies that the backdoored model has generalization error comparable with the original model. Second, we demonstrate how to insert undetectable backdoors in models trained using the Random Fourier Features (RFF) learning paradigm or in Random ReLU networks. In this construction, undetectability holds against powerful white-box distinguishers: given a complete description of the network and the training data, no efficient distinguisher can guess whether the model is "clean" or contains a backdoor. Our construction of undetectable backdoors also sheds light on the related issue of robustness to adversarial examples. In particular, our construction can produce a classifier that is indistinguishable from an "adversarially robust" classifier, but where every input has an adversarial example! In summary, the existence of undetectable backdoors represent a significant theoretical roadblock to certifying adversarial robustness.

The popularity of pretrained language models in natural language processing systems calls for a careful evaluation of such models in down-stream tasks, which have a higher potential for societal impact. The evaluation of such systems usually focuses on accuracy measures. Our findings in this paper call for attention to be paid to fairness measures as well. Through the analysis of more than a dozen pretrained language models of varying sizes on two toxic text classification tasks (English), we demonstrate that focusing on accuracy measures alone can lead to models with wide variation in fairness characteristics. Specifically, we observe that fairness can vary even more than accuracy with increasing training data size and different random initializations. At the same time, we find that little of the fairness variation is explained by model size, despite claims in the literature. To improve model fairness without retraining, we show that two post-processing methods developed for structured, tabular data can be successfully applied to a range of pretrained language models. Warning: This paper contains samples of offensive text.

Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental challenges such as the lack of convergence and the potential for catastrophic forgetting across real-world heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we demonstrate that self-attention-based architectures (e.g., Transformers) are more robust to distribution shifts and hence improve federated learning over heterogeneous data. Concretely, we conduct the first rigorous empirical investigation of different neural architectures across a range of federated algorithms, real-world benchmarks, and heterogeneous data splits. Our experiments show that simply replacing convolutional networks with Transformers can greatly reduce catastrophic forgetting of previous devices, accelerate convergence, and reach a better global model, especially when dealing with heterogeneous data. We release our code and pretrained models at https://github.com/Liangqiong/ViT-FL-main to encourage future exploration in robust architectures as an alternative to current research efforts on the optimization front.

We present a sequential Bayesian learning method for tracking non-stationary signal-to-noise ratios in LDPC codes using probabilistic graphical models. We represent the LDPC code as a cluster graph using a general purpose cluster graph construction algorithm called the layered trees running intersection property (LTRIP) algorithm. The channel noise estimator is a global Gamma cluster, which we extend to allow for Bayesian tracking of non-stationary noise variation. We evaluate our proposed model on real-world 5G drive test data. Our results show that our model is capable of tracking non-stationary channel noise, which outperforms an LDPC code with a fixed knowledge of the actual average channel noise.

Dual encoders have been used for question-answering (QA) and information retrieval (IR) tasks with good results. There are two major types of dual encoders, Siamese Dual Encoders (SDE), with parameters shared across two encoders, and Asymmetric Dual Encoder (ADE), with two distinctly parameterized encoders. In this work, we explore the dual encoder architectures for QA retrieval tasks. By evaluating on MS MARCO and the MultiReQA benchmark, we show that SDE performs significantly better than ADE. We further propose three different improved versions of ADEs. Based on the evaluation of QA retrieval tasks and direct analysis of the embeddings, we demonstrate that sharing parameters in projection layers would enable ADEs to perform competitively with SDEs.

We explore retrieving character-focused video frames as candidates for being video thumbnails. To evaluate each frame of the video based on the character(s) present in it, characters (faces) are evaluated in two aspects: Facial-expression: We train a CNN model to measure whether a face has an acceptable facial expression for being in a video thumbnail. This model is trained to distinguish faces extracted from artworks/thumbnails, from faces extracted from random frames of videos. Prominence and interactions: Character(s) in the thumbnail should be important character(s) in the video, to prevent the algorithm from suggesting non-representative frames as candidates. We use face clustering to identify the characters in the video, and form a graph in which the prominence (frequency of appearance) of the character(s), and their interactions (co-occurrence) are captured. We use this graph to infer the relevance of the characters present in each candidate frame. Once every face is scored based on the two criteria above, we infer frame level scores by combining the scores for all the faces within a frame.

Model ensemble is a popular approach to produce a low-variance and well-generalized model. However, it induces large memory and inference costs, which are often not affordable for real-world deployment. Existing work has resorted to sharing weights among models. However, when increasing the proportion of the shared weights, the resulting models tend to be similar, and the benefits of using model ensemble diminish. To retain ensemble benefits while maintaining a low memory cost, we propose a consistency-regularized ensemble learning approach based on perturbed models, named CAMERO. Specifically, we share the weights of bottom layers across all models and apply different perturbations to the hidden representations for different models, which can effectively promote the model diversity. Meanwhile, we apply a prediction consistency regularizer across the perturbed models to control the variance due to the model diversity. Our experiments using large language models demonstrate that CAMERO significantly improves the generalization performance of the ensemble model. Specifically, CAMERO outperforms the standard ensemble of 8 BERT-base models on the GLUE benchmark by 0.7 with a significantly smaller model size (114.2M vs. 880.6M).

We study the problem of expert advice under partial bandit feedback setting and create a sequential minimax optimal algorithm. Our algorithm works with a more general partial monitoring setting, where, in contrast to the classical bandit feedback, the losses can be revealed in an adversarial manner. Our algorithm adopts a universal prediction perspective, whose performance is analyzed with regret against a general expert selection sequence. The regret we study is against a general competition class that covers many settings (such as the switching or contextual experts settings) and the expert selection sequences in the competition class are determined by the application at hand. Our regret bounds are second order bounds in terms of the sum of squared losses and the normalized regret of our algorithm is invariant under arbitrary affine transforms of the loss sequence. Our algorithm is truly online and does not use any preliminary information about the loss sequences.

In this paper we investigate the problem of learning evolving concepts over a combinatorial structure. Previous work by Emamjomeh-Zadeh et al. [2020] introduced dynamics into interactive learning as a way to model non-static user preferences in clustering problems or recommender systems. We provide many useful contributions to this problem. First, we give a framework that captures both of the models analyzed by [Emamjomeh-Zadeh et al., 2020], which allows us to study any type of concept evolution and matches the same query complexity bounds and running time guarantees of the previous models. Using this general model we solve the open problem of closing the gap between the upper and lower bounds on query complexity. Finally, we study an efficient algorithm where the learner simply follows the feedback at each round, and we provide mistake bounds for low diameter graphs such as cliques, stars, and general o(log n) diameter graphs by using a Markov Chain model.

It is known that when the statistical models are singular, i.e., the Fisher information matrix at the true parameter is degenerate, the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm takes polynomial number of steps in terms of the sample size $n$ to converge to a final statistical radius around the true parameter, which can be unsatisfactory for the application. To further improve that computational complexity, we consider the utilization of the second-order information in the design of optimization algorithms. Specifically, we study the normalized gradient descent (NormGD) algorithm for solving parameter estimation in parametric statistical models, which is a variant of gradient descent algorithm whose step size is scaled by the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix of the empirical loss function of statistical models. When the population loss function, i.e., the limit of the empirical loss function when $n$ goes to infinity, is homogeneous in all directions, we demonstrate that the NormGD iterates reach a final statistical radius around the true parameter after a logarithmic number of iterations in terms of $n$. Therefore, for fixed dimension $d$, the NormGD algorithm achieves the optimal overall computational complexity $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to reach the final statistical radius. This computational complexity is cheaper than that of the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm, which is of the order $\mathcal{O}(n^{\tau})$ for some $\tau > 1$, to reach the same statistical radius. We illustrate our general theory under two statistical models: generalized linear models and mixture models, and experimental results support our prediction with general theory.

We give a sketching-based iterative algorithm that computes $1+\varepsilon$ approximate solutions for the ridge regression problem $\min_x \|{Ax-b}\|_2^2 +\lambda\|{x}\|_2^2$ where $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ with $d \ge n$. Our algorithm, for a constant number of iterations (requiring a constant number of passes over the input), improves upon earlier work of Chowdhury et al., by requiring that the sketching matrix only has a weaker Approximate Matrix Multiplication (AMM) guarantee that depends on $\epsilon$, along with a constant subspace embedding guarantee. The earlier work instead requires that the sketching matrix have a subspace embedding guarantee that depends on $\epsilon$. For example, to produce a $1+\varepsilon$ approximate solution in $1$ iteration, which requires $2$ passes over the input, our algorithm requires the OSNAP embedding to have $m= O(n\sigma^2/\lambda\varepsilon)$ rows with a sparsity parameter $s = O(\log(n))$, whereas the earlier algorithm of Chowdhury et al., with the same number of rows of OSNAP requires a sparsity $s = O(\sqrt{\sigma^2/\lambda\varepsilon} \cdot \log(n))$, where $\sigma = \|{A}\|_2$ is the spectral norm of the matrix $A$. We also show that this algorithm can be used to give faster algorithms for kernel ridge regression. Finally, we show that the sketch size required for our algorithm is essentially optimal for a natural framework of algorithms for ridge regression by proving lower bounds on oblivious sketching matrices for AMM. The sketch size lower bounds for AMM may be of independent interest.

Geographic variance in satellite imagery impacts the ability of machine learning models to generalise to new regions. In this paper, we model geographic generalisation in medium resolution Landsat-8 satellite imagery as a continuous domain adaptation problem, demonstrating how models generalise better with appropriate domain knowledge. We develop a dataset spatially distributed across the entire continental United States, providing macroscopic insight into the effects of geography on crop classification in multi-spectral and temporally distributed satellite imagery. Our method demonstrates improved generalisability from 1) passing geographically correlated climate variables along with the satellite data to a Transformer model and 2) regressing on the model features to reconstruct these domain variables. Combined, we provide a novel perspective on geographic generalisation in satellite imagery and a simple-yet-effective approach to leverage domain knowledge. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/samar-khanna/cropmap}

Generative models operate at fixed resolution, even though natural images come in a variety of sizes. As high-resolution details are downsampled away, and low-resolution images are discarded altogether, precious supervision is lost. We argue that every pixel matters and create datasets with variable-size images, collected at their native resolutions. Taking advantage of this data is challenging; high-resolution processing is costly, and current architectures can only process fixed-resolution data. We introduce continuous-scale training, a process that samples patches at random scales to train a new generator with variable output resolutions. First, conditioning the generator on a target scale allows us to generate higher resolutions images than previously possible, without adding layers to the model. Second, by conditioning on continuous coordinates, we can sample patches that still obey a consistent global layout, which also allows for scalable training at higher resolutions. Controlled FFHQ experiments show our method takes advantage of the multi-resolution training data better than discrete multi-scale approaches, achieving better FID scores and cleaner high-frequency details. We also train on other natural image domains including churches, mountains, and birds, and demonstrate arbitrary scale synthesis with both coherent global layouts and realistic local details, going beyond 2K resolution in our experiments. Our project page is available at: https://chail.github.io/anyres-gan/.

Abdominal auscultation is a convenient, safe and inexpensive method to assess bowel conditions, which is essential in neonatal care. It helps early detection of neonatal bowel dysfunctions and allows timely intervention. This paper presents a neonatal bowel sound detection method to assist the auscultation. Specifically, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to classify peristalsis and non-peristalsis sounds. The classification is then optimized using a Laplace Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HSMM). The proposed method is validated on abdominal sounds from 49 newborn infants admitted to our tertiary Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The results show that the method can effectively detect bowel sounds with accuracy and area under curve (AUC) score being 89.81% and 83.96% respectively, outperforming 13 baseline methods. Furthermore, the proposed Laplace HSMM refinement strategy is proven capable to enhance other bowel sound detection models. The outcomes of this work have the potential to facilitate future telehealth applications for neonatal care. The source code of our work can be found at: https://bitbucket.org/chirudeakin/neonatal-bowel-sound-classification/

Recently there has been sustained interest in modifying prediction algorithms to satisfy fairness constraints. These constraints are typically complex nonlinear functionals of the observed data distribution. Focusing on the path-specific causal constraints proposed by Nabi and Shpitser (2018), we introduce new theoretical results and optimization techniques to make model training easier and more accurate. Specifically, we show how to reparameterize the observed data likelihood such that fairness constraints correspond directly to parameters that appear in the likelihood, transforming a complex constrained optimization objective into a simple optimization problem with box constraints. We also exploit methods from empirical likelihood theory in statistics to improve predictive performance by constraining baseline covariates, without requiring parametric models. We combine the merits of both proposals to optimize a hybrid reparameterized likelihood. The techniques presented here should be applicable more broadly to fair prediction proposals that impose constraints on predictive models.

We propose Masked Siamese Networks (MSN), a self-supervised learning framework for learning image representations. Our approach matches the representation of an image view containing randomly masked patches to the representation of the original unmasked image. This self-supervised pre-training strategy is particularly scalable when applied to Vision Transformers since only the unmasked patches are processed by the network. As a result, MSNs improve the scalability of joint-embedding architectures, while producing representations of a high semantic level that perform competitively on low-shot image classification. For instance, on ImageNet-1K, with only 5,000 annotated images, our base MSN model achieves 72.4% top-1 accuracy, and with 1% of ImageNet-1K labels, we achieve 75.7% top-1 accuracy, setting a new state-of-the-art for self-supervised learning on this benchmark. Our code is publicly available.

Model compression becomes a recent trend due to the requirement of deploying neural networks on embedded and mobile devices. Hence, both accuracy and efficiency are of critical importance. To explore a balance between them, a knowledge distillation strategy is proposed for general visual representation learning. It utilizes our well-designed activation map adaptive module to replace some blocks of the teacher network, exploring the most appropriate supervisory features adaptively during the training process. Using the teacher's hidden layer output to prompt the student network to train so as to transfer effective semantic information.To verify the effectiveness of our strategy, this paper applied our method to cifar-10 dataset. Results demonstrate that the method can boost the accuracy of the student network by 0.6% with 6.5% loss reduction, and significantly improve its training speed.

The hidden nature and the limited accessibility of the Dark Web, combined with the lack of public datasets in this domain, make it difficult to study its inherent characteristics such as linguistic properties. Previous works on text classification of Dark Web domain have suggested that the use of deep neural models may be ineffective, potentially due to the linguistic differences between the Dark and Surface Webs. However, not much work has been done to uncover the linguistic characteristics of the Dark Web. This paper introduces CoDA, a publicly available Dark Web dataset consisting of 10000 web documents tailored towards text-based Dark Web analysis. By leveraging CoDA, we conduct a thorough linguistic analysis of the Dark Web and examine the textual differences between the Dark Web and the Surface Web. We also assess the performance of various methods of Dark Web page classification. Finally, we compare CoDA with an existing public Dark Web dataset and evaluate their suitability for various use cases.

In machine learning, disparity metrics are often defined by measuring the difference in the performance or outcome of a model, across different sub-populations (groups) of datapoints. Thus, the inputs to disparity quantification consist of a model's predictions $\hat{y}$, the ground-truth labels for the predictions $y$, and group labels $g$ for the data points. Performance of the model for each group is calculated by comparing $\hat{y}$ and $y$ for the datapoints within a specific group, and as a result, disparity of performance across the different groups can be calculated. In many real world scenarios however, group labels ($g$) may not be available at scale during training and validation time, or collecting them might not be feasible or desirable as they could often be sensitive information. As a result, evaluating disparity metrics across categorical groups would not be feasible. On the other hand, in many scenarios noisy groupings may be obtainable using some form of a proxy, which would allow measuring disparity metrics across sub-populations. Here we explore performing such analysis on computer vision models trained on human faces, and on tasks such as face attribute prediction and affect estimation. Our experiments indicate that embeddings resulting from an off-the-shelf face recognition model, could meaningfully serve as a proxy for such estimation.

Split learning is a popular technique used for vertical federated learning (VFL), where the goal is to jointly train a model on the private input and label data held by two parties. This technique uses a split-model, trained end-to-end, by exchanging the intermediate representations (IR) of the inputs and gradients of the IR between the two parties. We propose ExPLoit - a label-leakage attack that allows an adversarial input-owner to extract the private labels of the label-owner during split-learning. ExPLoit frames the attack as a supervised learning problem by using a novel loss function that combines gradient-matching and several regularization terms developed using key properties of the dataset and models. Our evaluations show that ExPLoit can uncover the private labels with near-perfect accuracy of up to 99.96%. Our findings underscore the need for better training techniques for VFL.

Learning robot policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing robot behavior. However, in recent years, there has been a growing body of anecdotal evidence that learning reward functions from preferences is prone to spurious correlations and reward gaming or hacking behaviors. While there is much anecdotal, empirical, and theoretical analysis of causal confusion and reward gaming behaviors both in reinforcement learning and imitation learning approaches that directly map from states to actions, we provide the first systematic study of causal confusion in the context of learning reward functions from preferences. To facilitate this study, we identify a set of three preference learning benchmark domains where we observe causal confusion when learning from offline datasets of pairwise trajectory preferences: a simple reacher domain, an assistive feeding domain, and an itch-scratching domain. To gain insight into this observed causal confusion, we present a sensitivity analysis that explores the effect of different factors--including the type of training data, reward model capacity, and feature dimensionality--on the robustness of rewards learned from preferences. We find evidence that learning rewards from pairwise trajectory preferences is highly sensitive and non-robust to spurious features and increasing model capacity, but not as sensitive to the type of training data. Videos, code, and supplemental results are available at https://sites.google.com/view/causal-reward-confusion.

A lot of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) research is of an empirical nature. Nevertheless, statistical significance testing (SST) is still not widely used. This endangers true progress, as seeming improvements over a baseline might be statistical flukes, leading follow-up research astray while wasting human and computational resources. Here, we provide an easy-to-use package containing different significance tests and utility functions specifically tailored towards research needs and usability.

Disparate treatment occurs when a machine learning model yields different decisions for individuals based on a sensitive attribute (e.g., age, sex). In domains where prediction accuracy is paramount, it could potentially be acceptable to fit a model which exhibits disparate treatment. To evaluate the effect of disparate treatment, we compare the performance of split classifiers (i.e., classifiers trained and deployed separately on each group) with group-blind classifiers (i.e., classifiers which do not use a sensitive attribute). We introduce the benefit-of-splitting for quantifying the performance improvement by splitting classifiers. Computing the benefit-of-splitting directly from its definition could be intractable since it involves solving optimization problems over an infinite-dimensional functional space. Under different performance measures, we (i) prove an equivalent expression for the benefit-of-splitting which can be efficiently computed by solving small-scale convex programs; (ii) provide sharp upper and lower bounds for the benefit-of-splitting which reveal precise conditions where a group-blind classifier will always suffer from a non-trivial performance gap from the split classifiers. In the finite sample regime, splitting is not necessarily beneficial and we provide data-dependent bounds to understand this effect. Finally, we validate our theoretical results through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Many applications require accurate indoor localization. Fingerprint-based localization methods propose a solution to this problem, but rely on a radio map that is effort-intensive to acquire. We automate the radio map acquisition phase using a software-defined radio (SDR) and a wheeled robot. Furthermore, we open-source a radio map acquired with our automated tool for a 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless link. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available radio map containing channel state information (CSI). Finally, we describe first localization experiments on this radio map using a convolutional neural network to regress for location coordinates.

We consider the problem of quantum state certification, where we are given the description of a mixed state $\sigma \in \mathbb{C}^{d \times d}$, $n$ copies of a mixed state $\rho \in \mathbb{C}^{d \times d}$, and $\varepsilon > 0$, and we are asked to determine whether $\rho = \sigma$ or whether $\| \rho - \sigma \|_1 > \varepsilon$. When $\sigma$ is the maximally mixed state $\frac{1}{d} I_d$, this is known as mixedness testing. We focus on algorithms which use incoherent measurements, i.e. which only measure one copy of $\rho$ at a time. Unlike those that use entangled, multi-copy measurements, these can be implemented without persistent quantum memory and thus represent a large class of protocols that can be run on current or near-term devices. For mixedness testing, there is a folklore algorithm which uses incoherent measurements and only needs $O(d^{3/2} / \varepsilon^2)$ copies. The algorithm is non-adaptive, that is, its measurements are fixed ahead of time, and is known to be optimal for non-adaptive algorithms. However, when the algorithm can make arbitrary incoherent measurements, the best known lower bound is only $\Omega (d^{4/3} / \varepsilon^2)$ [Bubeck-Chen-Li '20], and it has been an outstanding open problem to close this polynomial gap. In this work, 1) we settle the copy complexity of mixedness testing with incoherent measurements and show that $\Omega (d^{3/2} / \varepsilon^2)$ copies are necessary, and 2) we show the instance-optimal bounds for state certification to general $\sigma$ first derived by [Chen-Li-O'Donnell '21] for non-adaptive measurements also hold for arbitrary incoherent measurements. Qualitatively, our results say that adaptivity does not help at all for these problems. Our results are based on new techniques that allow us to reduce the problem to understanding certain matrix martingales, which we believe may be of independent interest.

Supervised learning has traditionally focused on inductive learning by observing labeled examples of a task. In contrast, humans have the ability to learn new concepts from language. Here, we explore training zero-shot classifiers for structured data purely from language. For this, we introduce CLUES, a benchmark for Classifier Learning Using natural language ExplanationS, consisting of a range of classification tasks over structured data along with natural language supervision in the form of explanations. CLUES consists of 36 real-world and 144 synthetic classification tasks. It contains crowdsourced explanations describing real-world tasks from multiple teachers and programmatically generated explanations for the synthetic tasks. To model the influence of explanations in classifying an example, we develop ExEnt, an entailment-based model that learns classifiers using explanations. ExEnt generalizes up to 18% better (relative) on novel tasks than a baseline that does not use explanations. We delineate key challenges for automated learning from explanations, addressing which can lead to progress on CLUES in the future. Code and datasets are available at: https://clues-benchmark.github.io.

Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and decision-making either lacks a systematic way to describe this source of uncertainty or puts the focus on obtaining optimal policies using complex models of the world that would impose an unrealistically high cognitive demand on real agents. In this work we aim to efficiently describe the emergent behavior of biologically plausible and parsimonious learning agents faced with partially observable worlds. Therefore we derive and present deterministic reinforcement learning dynamics where the agents observe the true state of the environment only partially. We showcase the broad applicability of our dynamics across different classes of partially observable agent-environment systems. We find that partial observability creates unintuitive benefits in a number of specific contexts, pointing the way to further research on a general understanding of such effects. For instance, partially observant agents can learn better outcomes faster, in a more stable way and even overcome social dilemmas. Furthermore, our method allows the application of dynamical systems theory to partially observable multiagent leaning. In this regard we find the emergence of catastrophic limit cycles, a critical slowing down of the learning processes between reward regimes and the separation of the learning dynamics into fast and slow directions, all caused by partial observability. Therefore, the presented dynamics have the potential to become a formal, yet practical, lightweight and robust tool for researchers in biology, social science and machine learning to systematically investigate the effects of interacting partially observant agents.

Measures to predict 30-day readmission are considered an important quality factor for hospitals as accurate predictions can reduce the overall cost of care by identifying high risk patients before they are discharged. While recent deep learning-based studies have shown promising empirical results on readmission prediction, several limitations exist that may hinder widespread clinical utility, such as (a) only patients with certain conditions are considered, (b) existing approaches do not leverage data temporality, (c) individual admissions are assumed independent of each other, which is unrealistic, (d) prior studies are usually limited to single source of data and single center data. To address these limitations, we propose a multimodal, modality-agnostic spatiotemporal graph neural network (MM-STGNN) for prediction of 30-day all-cause hospital readmission that fuses multimodal in-patient longitudinal data. By training and evaluating our methods using longitudinal chest radiographs and electronic health records from two independent centers, we demonstrate that MM-STGNN achieves AUROC of 0.79 on both primary and external datasets. Furthermore, MM-STGNN significantly outperforms the current clinical reference standard, LACE+ score (AUROC=0.61), on the primary dataset. For subset populations of patients with heart and vascular disease, our model also outperforms baselines on predicting 30-day readmission (e.g., 3.7 point improvement in AUROC in patients with heart disease). Lastly, qualitative model interpretability analysis indicates that while patients' primary diagnoses were not explicitly used to train the model, node features crucial for model prediction directly reflect patients' primary diagnoses. Importantly, our MM-STGNN is agnostic to node feature modalities and could be utilized to integrate multimodal data for triaging patients in various downstream resource allocation tasks.

In this work, we highlight our novel evolutionary sparse time-series forecasting algorithm also known as EvoSTS. The algorithm attempts to evolutionary prioritize weights of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network that best minimize the reconstruction loss of a predicted signal using a learned sparse coded dictionary. In each generation of our evolutionary algorithm, a set number of children with the same initial weights are spawned. Each child undergoes a training step and adjusts their weights on the same data. Due to stochastic back-propagation, the set of children has a variety of weights with different levels of performance. The weights that best minimize the reconstruction loss with a given signal dictionary are passed to the next generation. The predictions from the best-performing weights of the first and last generation are compared. We found improvements while comparing the weights of these two generations. However, due to several confounding parameters and hyperparameter limitations, some of the weights had negligible improvements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use sparse coding in this way to optimize time series forecasting model weights, such as those of an LSTM network.

Screening mammography improves breast cancer outcomes by enabling early detection and treatment. However, false positive callbacks for additional imaging from screening exams cause unnecessary procedures, patient anxiety, and financial burden. This work demonstrates an AI algorithm that reduces false positives by identifying mammograms not suspicious for breast cancer. We trained the algorithm to determine the absence of cancer using 123,248 2D digital mammograms (6,161 cancers) and performed a retrospective study on 14,831 screening exams (1,026 cancers) from 15 US and 3 UK sites. Retrospective evaluation of the algorithm on the largest of the US sites (11,592 mammograms, 101 cancers) a) left the cancer detection rate unaffected (p=0.02, non-inferiority margin 0.25 cancers per 1000 exams), b) reduced callbacks for diagnostic exams by 31.1% compared to standard clinical readings, c) reduced benign needle biopsies by 7.4%, and d) reduced screening exams requiring radiologist interpretation by 41.6% in the simulated clinical workflow. This work lays the foundation for semi-autonomous breast cancer screening systems that could benefit patients and healthcare systems by reducing false positives, unnecessary procedures, patient anxiety, and expenses.

Self-supervised pre-training methods have brought remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of text, image, and speech. Recent developments in genomics has also adopted these pre-training methods for genome understanding. However, they focus only on understanding haploid sequences, which hinders their applicability towards understanding genetic variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which is crucial for genome-wide association study. In this paper, we introduce SNP2Vec, a scalable self-supervised pre-training approach for understanding SNP. We apply SNP2Vec to perform long-sequence genomics modeling, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on predicting Alzheimer's disease risk in a Chinese cohort. Our approach significantly outperforms existing polygenic risk score methods and all other baselines, including the model that is trained entirely with haploid sequences. We release our code and dataset on https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/snp2vec.

Deep Learning (DL) methods have emerged as one of the most powerful tools for functional approximation and prediction. While the representation properties of DL have been well studied, uncertainty quantification remains challenging and largely unexplored. Data augmentation techniques are a natural approach to provide uncertainty quantification and to incorporate stochastic Monte Carlo search into stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods. The purpose of our paper is to show that training DL architectures with data augmentation leads to efficiency gains. We use the theory of scale mixtures of normals to derive data augmentation strategies for deep learning. This allows variants of the expectation-maximization and MCMC algorithms to be brought to bear on these high dimensional nonlinear deep learning models. To demonstrate our methodology, we develop data augmentation algorithms for a variety of commonly used activation functions: logit, ReLU, leaky ReLU and SVM. Our methodology is compared to traditional stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation. Our optimization procedure leads to a version of iteratively re-weighted least squares and can be implemented at scale with accelerated linear algebra methods providing substantial improvement in speed. We illustrate our methodology on a number of standard datasets. Finally, we conclude with directions for future research.

Social media platforms provide convenient means for users to participate in multiple online activities on various contents and create fast widespread interactions. However, this rapidly growing access has also increased the diverse information, and characterizing user types to understand people's lifestyle decisions shared in social media is challenging. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised graph embedding based framework for understanding user types. We evaluate the user embedding learned using weak supervision over well-being related tweets from Twitter, focusing on 'Yoga', 'Keto diet'. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines for detecting user types. Finally, we illustrate data analysis on different types of users (e.g., practitioner vs. promotional) from our dataset. While we focus on lifestyle-related tweets (i.e., yoga, keto), our method for constructing user representation readily generalizes to other domains.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have played a catalytic role in enabling the 4th Industrial Revolution. ICS devices like Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), automate, monitor, and control critical processes in industrial, energy, and commercial environments. The convergence of traditional Operational Technology (OT) with Information Technology (IT) has opened a new and unique threat landscape. This has inspired defense research that focuses heavily on Machine Learning (ML) based anomaly detection methods that run on external IT hardware, which means an increase in costs and the further expansion of the threat landscape. To remove this requirement, we introduce the ICS machine learning inference framework (ICSML) which enables the execution of ML model inference natively on the PLC. ICSML is implemented in IEC 61131-3 code and provides several optimizations to bypass the limitations imposed by the domain-specific languages. Therefore, it works \emph{on every PLC without the need for vendor support}. ICSML provides a complete set of components for the creation of full ML models similarly to established ML frameworks. We run a series of benchmarks studying memory and performance and compare our solution to the TFLite inference framework. At the same time, we develop domain-specific model optimizations to improve the efficiency of ICSML. To demonstrate the abilities of ICSML, we evaluate a case study of a real defense for process-aware attacks targeting a desalination plant.

In sliced networks, the shared tenancy of slices requires adaptive admission control of data flows, based on measurements of network resources. In this paper, we investigate the design of measurement-based admission control schemes, deciding whether a new data flow can be admitted and in this case, on which slice. The objective is to devise a joint measurement and decision strategy that returns a correct decision (e.g., the least loaded slice) with a certain level of confidence while minimizing the measurement cost (the number of measurements made before committing to the decision). We study the design of such strategies for several natural admission criteria specifying what a correct decision is. For each of these criteria, using tools from best arm identification in bandits, we first derive an explicit information-theoretical lower bound on the cost of any algorithm returning the correct decision with fixed confidence. We then devise a joint measurement and decision strategy achieving this theoretical limit. We compare empirically the measurement costs of these strategies, and compare them both to the lower bounds as well as a naive measurement scheme. We find that our algorithm significantly outperforms the naive scheme (by a factor $2-8$).

Supervised machine learning approaches require the formulation of a loss functional to be minimized in the training phase. Sequential data are ubiquitous across many fields of research, and are often treated with Euclidean distance-based loss functions that were designed for tabular data. For smooth oscillatory data, those conventional approaches lack the ability to penalize amplitude, frequency and phase prediction errors at the same time, and tend to be biased towards amplitude errors. We introduce the surface similarity parameter (SSP) as a novel loss function that is especially useful for training machine learning models on smooth oscillatory sequences. Our extensive experiments on chaotic spatio-temporal dynamical systems indicate that the SSP is beneficial for shaping gradients, thereby accelerating the training process, reducing the final prediction error, and implementing a stronger regularization effect compared to using classical loss functions. The results indicate the potential of the novel loss metric particularly for highly complex and chaotic data, such as data stemming from the nonlinear two-dimensional Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation and the linear propagation of dispersive surface gravity waves in fluids.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which the server periodically aggregates local model parameters from clients without assembling their private data. User-constrained communication bandwidth and the requirement for personalized models pose severe challenges to FL. Federated distillation (FD) is proposed to simultaneously address the two problems, which exchanges knowledge between the server and clients, supporting heterogeneous local models while significantly reducing communication overhead. However, most existing FD methods require a proxy dataset, which is often unavailable. Proxy-data-free FD approaches eliminate the need for additional public data beyond clients' private data, but suffer from remarkable discrepancy among local knowledge due to model heterogeneity, leading to ambiguous representation on the server and inevitable accuracy degradation. To tackle this issue, we propose a proxy-data-free FD algorithm based on distributed knowledge congruence (FedDKC). FedDKC leverages well-designed refinement strategies to narrow local knowledge differences into an acceptable upper bound to mitigate the negative effects of knowledge incongruence. Specifically, from perspectives of peak probability and Shannon entropy of local knowledge, we design kernel-based knowledge refinement (KKR) and searching-based knowledge refinement (SKR) respectively, and theoretically guarantee the refined-local knowledge can satisfy an approximately-similar distribution and be regarded as congruent. Extensive experiments conducted on three common datasets demonstrate that our proposed FedDKC method outperforms the state-of-the-art in 93.33% of comparisons, and achieves faster convergence without increasing communication overhead.

This paper contributes with a pragmatic evaluation framework for explainable Machine Learning (ML) models for clinical decision support. The study revealed a more nuanced role for ML explanation models, when these are pragmatically embedded in the clinical context. Despite the general positive attitude of healthcare professionals (HCPs) towards explanations as a safety and trust mechanism, for a significant set of participants there were negative effects associated with confirmation bias, accentuating model over-reliance and increased effort to interact with the model. Also, contradicting one of its main intended functions, standard explanatory models showed limited ability to support a critical understanding of the limitations of the model. However, we found new significant positive effects which repositions the role of explanations within a clinical context: these include reduction of automation bias, addressing ambiguous clinical cases (cases where HCPs were not certain about their decision) and support of less experienced HCPs in the acquisition of new domain knowledge.

We present Visuelle 2.0, the first dataset useful for facing diverse prediction problems that a fast-fashion company has to manage routinely. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the use of computer vision is substantial in this scenario. Visuelle 2.0 contains data for 6 seasons / 5355 clothing products of Nuna Lie, a famous Italian company with hundreds of shops located in different areas within the country. In particular, we focus on a specific prediction problem, namely short-observation new product sale forecasting (SO-fore). SO-fore assumes that the season has started and a set of new products is on the shelves of the different stores. The goal is to forecast the sales for a particular horizon, given a short, available past (few weeks), since no earlier statistics are available. To be successful, SO-fore approaches should capture this short past and exploit other modalities or exogenous data. To these aims, Visuelle 2.0 is equipped with disaggregated data at the item-shop level and multi-modal information for each clothing item, allowing computer vision approaches to come into play. The main message that we deliver is that the use of image data with deep networks boosts performances obtained when using the time series in long-term forecasting scenarios, ameliorating the WAPE by 8.2% and the MAE by 7.7%. The dataset is available at: https://humaticslab.github.io/forecasting/visuelle.

This paper presents new machine learning approaches to approximate the solutions of optimal stopping problems. The key idea of these methods is to use neural networks, where the parameters of the hidden layers are generated randomly and only the last layer is trained, in order to approximate the continuation value. Our approaches are applicable to high dimensional problems where the existing approaches become increasingly impractical. In addition, since our approaches can be optimized using simple linear regression, they are easy to implement and theoretical guarantees are provided. Our randomized reinforcement learning approach and randomized recurrent neural network approach outperform the state-of-the-art and other relevant machine learning approaches in Markovian and non-Markovian examples, respectively. In particular, we test our approaches on Black-Scholes, Heston, rough Heston and fractional Brownian motion. Moreover, we show that they can also be used to efficiently compute Greeks of American options.

Despite being studied extensively for a few decades, handwritten character recognition (HCR) is considered a challenging learning problem in pattern recognition and there is very limited research on script independent models. This is mainly because of diversity of scripts, focus of the conventional research on handcrafted feature extraction techniques, and unavailability of public datasets and codes to reproduce the results. On the other hand, deep learning has witnessed huge success in different areas of pattern recognition, including HCR, and provides end-to-end learning but it has been studied for specific scripts only. In this paper, we have proposed a novel deep learning architecture which exploits transfer learning and image-augmentation for end-to-end learning for script independent handwritten character recognition, called HCR-Net. HCR-Net is based on a novel transfer learning approach for HCR, where some of lower layers of a pre-trained network are utilized. Due to transfer learning and image-augmentation, HCR-Net provides faster training, better performance and better generalizations, and can achieve up to 99\% results of its final accuracy in just first epoch. The experimental results on publicly available datasets of Bangla, Punjabi, Hindi, English, Swedish, Urdu, Farsi, Tibetan, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Nepali and Arabic languages prove the efficacy of HCR-Net and establishes several new benchmarks. For reproducibility of the results and for the advancements of the HCR research, complete code is publicly released at https://github.com/jmdvinodjmd/HCR-Net.

In this study, we propose a novel adversarial reprogramming (AR) approach for low-resource spoken command recognition (SCR), and build an AR-SCR system. The AR procedure aims to modify the acoustic signals (from the target domain) to repurpose a pretrained SCR model (from the source domain). To solve the label mismatches between source and target domains, and further improve the stability of AR, we propose a novel similarity-based label mapping technique to align classes. In addition, the transfer learning (TL) technique is combined with the original AR process to improve the model adaptation capability. We evaluate the proposed AR-SCR system on three low-resource SCR datasets, including Arabic, Lithuanian, and dysarthric Mandarin speech. Experimental results show that with a pretrained AM trained on a large-scale English dataset, the proposed AR-SCR system outperforms the current state-of-the-art results on Arabic and Lithuanian speech commands datasets, with only a limited amount of training data.

Making an informed decision -- for example, when choosing a career or housing -- requires knowledge about the available options. Such knowledge is generally acquired through costly trial and error, but this learning process can be disrupted by competition. In this work, we study how competition affects the long-term outcomes of individuals as they learn. We build on a line of work that models this setting as a two-sided matching market with bandit learners. A recent result in this area states that it is impossible to simultaneously guarantee two natural desiderata: stability and low optimal regret for all agents. Resource-allocating platforms can point to this result as a justification for assigning good long-term outcomes to some agents and poor ones to others. We show that this impossibility need not hold true. In particular, by modeling two additional components of competition -- namely, costs and transfers -- we prove that it is possible to simultaneously guarantee four desiderata: stability, low optimal regret, fairness in the distribution of regret, and high social welfare.

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Adversaries can mislead policies of DRL agents by perturbing the state of the environment observed by the agents. Existing attacks are feasible in principle but face challenges in practice, either by being too slow to fool DRL policies in real time or by modifying past observations stored in the agent's memory. We show that using the Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) method to compute perturbations, independent of the individual inputs to which they are applied to, can fool DRL policies effectively and in real time. We describe three such attack variants. Via an extensive evaluation using three Atari 2600 games, we show that our attacks are effective, as they fully degrade the performance of three different DRL agents (up to 100%, even when the $l_\infty$ bound on the perturbation is as small as 0.01). It is faster compared to the response time (0.6ms on average) of different DRL policies, and considerably faster than prior attacks using adversarial perturbations (1.8ms on average). We also show that our attack technique is efficient, incurring an online computational cost of 0.027ms on average. Using two further tasks involving robotic movement, we confirm that our results generalize to more complex DRL tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the effectiveness of known defenses diminishes against universal perturbations. We propose an effective technique that detects all known adversarial perturbations against DRL policies, including all the universal perturbations presented in this paper.

One way to interpret the behavior of a blackbox recurrent neural network (RNN) is to extract from it a more interpretable discrete computational model, like a finite state machine, that captures its behavior. In this work, we propose a new method for extracting finite automata from RNNs inspired by the state merging paradigm from grammatical inference. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the Tomita languages benchmark, where we find that it is able to extract faithful automata from RNNs trained on all languages in the benchmark. We find that extraction performance is aided by the number of data provided during the extraction process, as well as, curiously, whether the RNN model is trained for additional epochs after perfectly learning its target language. We use our method to analyze this phenomenon, finding that training beyond convergence is useful because it leads to compression of the internal state space of the RNN. This finding demonstrates how our method can be used for interpretability and analysis of trained RNN models.

Prevailing deep models are single-purpose and overspecialize at individual tasks. However, when being extended to new tasks, they typically forget previously learned skills and learn from scratch. We address this issue by introducing SkillNet, a general-purpose model that stitches together existing skills to learn new tasks more effectively. The key feature of our approach is that it is sparsely activated guided by predefined skills. Different from traditional dense models that always activate all the model parameters, SkillNet only activates parts of the model parameters whose skills are relevant to the target task. When learning for a new task, our approach precisely activates required skills and also provides an option to add new skills. We evaluate on natural language understandings tasks and have the following findings. First, with only one model checkpoint, SkillNet performs better than task-specific fine-tuning and two multi-task learning baselines (i.e., dense model and Mixture-of-Experts model) on six tasks. Second, sparsely activated pre-training further improves the overall performance. Third, SkillNet significantly outperforms baseline systems when being extended to new tasks.

Predicting the number of infections in the anti-epidemic process is extremely beneficial to the government in developing anti-epidemic strategies, especially in fine-grained geographic units. Previous works focus on low spatial resolution prediction, e.g., county-level, and preprocess data to the same geographic level, which loses some useful information. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained population mobility data-based model (FGC-COVID) utilizing data of two geographic levels for community-level COVID-19 prediction. We use the population mobility data between Census Block Groups (CBGs), which is a finer-grained geographic level than community, to build the graph and capture the dependencies between CBGs using graph neural networks (GNNs). To mine as finer-grained patterns as possible for prediction, a spatial weighted aggregation module is introduced to aggregate the embeddings of CBGs to community level based on their geographic affiliation and spatial autocorrelation. Extensive experiments on 300 days LA city COVID-19 data indicate our model outperforms existing forecasting models on community-level COVID-19 prediction.

The use of episodic memory in continual learning has demonstrated effectiveness for alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In recent studies, gradient-based approaches have been developed to make more efficient use of compact episodic memory. Such approaches refine the gradients resulting from new samples by those from memorized samples, aiming to reduce the diversity of gradients from different tasks. In this paper, we clarify the relation between diversity of gradients and discriminativeness of representations, showing shared as well as conflicting interests between Deep Metric Learning and continual learning, thus demonstrating pros and cons of learning discriminative representations in continual learning. Based on these findings, we propose a simple method -- Semi-Discriminative Representation Loss (SDRL) -- for continual learning. In comparison with state-of-the-art methods, SDRL shows better performance with low computational cost on multiple benchmark tasks in the setting of online continual learning.

A long standing problem in the modeling of non-Newtonian hydrodynamics of polymeric flows is the availability of reliable and interpretable hydrodynamic models that faithfully encode the underlying micro-scale polymer dynamics. The main complication arises from the long polymer relaxation time, the complex molecular structure and heterogeneous interaction. DeePN$^2$, a deep learning-based non-Newtonian hydrodynamic model, has been proposed and has shown some success in systematically passing the micro-scale structural mechanics information to the macro-scale hydrodynamics for suspensions with simple polymer conformation and bond potential. The model retains a multi-scaled nature by mapping the polymer configurations into a set of symmetry-preserving macro-scale features. The extended constitutive laws for these macro-scale features can be directly learned from the kinetics of their micro-scale counterparts. In this paper, we develop DeePN$^2$ using more complex micro-structural models. We show that DeePN$^2$ can faithfully capture the broadly overlooked viscoelastic differences arising from the specific molecular structural mechanics without human intervention.

Data stream classification is an important problem in the field of machine learning. Due to the non-stationary nature of the data where the underlying distribution changes over time (concept drift), the model needs to continuously adapt to new data statistics. Stream-based Active Learning (AL) approaches address this problem by interactively querying a human expert to provide new data labels for the most recent samples, within a limited budget. Existing AL strategies assume that labels are immediately available, while in a real-world scenario the expert requires time to provide a queried label (verification latency), and by the time the requested labels arrive they may not be relevant anymore. In this article, we investigate the influence of finite, time-variable, and unknown verification delay, in the presence of concept drift on AL approaches. We propose PRopagate (PR), a latency independent utility estimator which also predicts the requested, but not yet known, labels. Furthermore, we propose a drift-dependent dynamic budget strategy, which uses a variable distribution of the labelling budget over time, after a detected drift. Thorough experimental evaluation, with both synthetic and real-world non-stationary datasets, and different settings of verification latency and budget are conducted and analyzed. We empirically show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we demonstrate that with variable budget allocation in time, it is possible to boost the performance of AL strategies, without increasing the overall labeling budget.

Accurate segmentation of medical images is essential for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. These problems are solved by highly complex models, such as deep networks (DN), requiring a large amount of labeled data for training. Thereby, many DNs possess task- or imaging modality specific architectures with a decision-making process that is often hard to explain and interpret. Here, we propose a framework that embeds existing DNs into a low-dimensional subspace induced by the learnable explicit feature map (LEFM) layer. Compared to the existing DN, the framework adds one hyperparameter and only modestly increase the number of learnable parameters. The method is aimed at, but not limited to, segmentation of low-dimensional medical images, such as color histopathological images of stained frozen sections. Since features in the LEFM layer are polynomial functions of the original features, proposed LEFM-Nets contribute to the interpretability of network decisions. In this work, we combined LEFM with the known networks: DeepLabv3+, UNet, UNet++ and MA-net. New LEFM-Nets are applied to the segmentation of adenocarcinoma of a colon in a liver from images of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained frozen sections. LEFM-Nets are also tested on nuclei segmentation from images of H&E stained frozen sections of ten human organs. On the first problem, LEFM-Nets achieved statistically significant performance improvement in terms of micro balanced accuracy and $F_1$ score than original networks. LEFM-Nets achieved only better performance in comparison with the original networks on the second problem. The source code is available at https://github.com/dsitnik/lefm.

Coordinate-based neural networks parameterizing implicit surfaces have emerged as efficient representations of geometry. They effectively act as parametric level sets with the zero-level set defining the surface of interest. We present a framework that allows applying deformation operations defined for triangle meshes onto such implicit surfaces. Several of these operations can be viewed as energy-minimization problems that induce an instantaneous flow field on the explicit surface. Our method uses the flow field to deform parametric implicit surfaces by extending the classical theory of level sets. We also derive a consolidated view for existing methods on differentiable surface extraction and rendering, by formalizing connections to the level-set theory. We show that these methods drift from the theory and that our approach exhibits improvements for applications like surface smoothing, mean-curvature flow, inverse rendering and user-defined editing on implicit geometry.

Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference algorithm can be used as a probabilistic programming back-end that is simultaneously reliable, efficient, black-box, and general. Probabilistic programming languages often choose a single algorithm to apply to a given problem, thus inheriting its limitations. While substantial work has been done both to formalise probabilistic programming and to improve efficiency of inference, there has been little work that makes use of the available program structure, by formally analysing it, to better utilise the underlying inference algorithm. This dissertation presents three novel techniques (both static and dynamic), which aim to improve probabilistic programming using program analysis. The techniques analyse a probabilistic program and adapt it to make inference more efficient, sometimes in a way that would have been tedious or impossible to do by hand.

Counterfactual explanations have been widely studied in explainability, with a range of application dependent methods emerging in fairness, recourse and model understanding. However, the major shortcoming associated with these methods is their inability to provide explanations beyond the local or instance-level. While some works touch upon the notion of a global explanation, typically suggesting to aggregate masses of local explanations in the hope of ascertaining global properties, few provide frameworks that are either reliable or computationally tractable. Meanwhile, practitioners are requesting more efficient and interactive explainability tools. We take this opportunity to investigate existing global methods, with a focus on implementing and improving Actionable Recourse Summaries (AReS), the only known global counterfactual explanation framework for recourse.

We present an efficient method of pretraining large-scale autoencoding language models using training signals generated by an auxiliary model. Originated in ELECTRA, this training strategy has demonstrated sample-efficiency to pretrain models at the scale of hundreds of millions of parameters. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study, and propose a recipe, namely "Model generated dEnoising TRaining Objective" (METRO), which incorporates some of the best modeling techniques developed recently to speed up, stabilize, and enhance pretrained language models without compromising model effectiveness. The resultant models, METRO-LM, consisting of up to 5.4 billion parameters, achieve new state-of-the-art on the GLUE, SuperGLUE, and SQuAD benchmarks. More importantly, METRO-LM are efficient in that they often outperform previous large models with significantly smaller model sizes and lower pretraining cost.

This paper proposes a computationally efficient methodology to predict the damage progression in solder contacts of electronic components using temperature-time curves. For this purpose, two machine learning algorithms, a Multilayer Perceptron and a Long Short-Term Memory network, are trained and compared with respect to their prediction accuracy and the required amount of training data. The training is performed using synthetic, normally distributed data that is realistic for automotive applications. A finite element model of a simple bipolar chip resistor in surface mount technology configuration is used to numerically compute the synthetic data. As a result, both machine learning algorithms show a relevant accuracy for the prediction of accumulated creep strains. With a training data length of 350 hours (12.5% of the available training data), both models show a constantly good fitting performance of $R^2$ of 0.72 for the Multilayer Perceptron and $R^2$ of 0.87 for the Long Short-Term Memory network. The prediction errors of the accumulated creep strains are less than 10% with an amount of 350 hours training data and decreases to less than 5 % when using further data. Therefore, both approaches are promising for the lifetime prediction directly on the electronic device.

In this paper, we propose Wasserstein Isometric Mapping (Wassmap), a parameter-free nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that provides solutions to some drawbacks in existing global nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms in imaging applications. Wassmap represents images via probability measures in Wasserstein space, then uses pairwise quadratic Wasserstein distances between the associated measures to produce a low-dimensional, approximately isometric embedding. We show that the algorithm is able to exactly recover parameters of some image manifolds including those generated by translations or dilations of a fixed generating measure. Additionally, we show that a discrete version of the algorithm retrieves parameters from manifolds generated from discrete measures by providing a theoretical bridge to transfer recovery results from functional data to discrete data. Testing of the proposed algorithms on various image data manifolds show that Wassmap yields good embeddings compared with other global techniques.

In conversational question answering, systems must correctly interpret the interconnected interactions and generate knowledgeable answers, which may require the retrieval of relevant information from a background repository. Recent approaches to this problem leverage neural language models, although different alternatives can be considered in terms of modules for (a) representing user questions in context, (b) retrieving the relevant background information, and (c) generating the answer. This work presents a conversational question answering system designed specifically for the Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) shared task, and reports on a detailed analysis of its question rewriting module. In particular, we considered different variations of the question rewriting module to evaluate the influence on the subsequent components, and performed a careful analysis of the results obtained with the best system configuration. Our system achieved the best performance in the shared task and our analysis emphasizes the importance of the conversation context representation for the overall system performance.

We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed stochastic bandit tasks. The tasks may be designed by an adversary, but the adversary is constrained to choose the optimal arm of each task in a smaller (but unknown) subset of $M$ arms. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting), and the number of tasks $N$ as well as the total number of rounds $T$ are known ($N$ could be unknown in the meta-learning setting). We design an algorithm based on a reduction to bandit submodular maximization, and show that its regret in both settings is smaller than the simple baseline of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{KNT})$ that can be obtained by using standard algorithms designed for non-stationary bandit problems. For the bandit meta-learning problem with fixed task length $\tau$, we show that the regret of the algorithm is bounded as $\tilde{O}(N\sqrt{M \tau}+N^{2/3})$. Under additional assumptions on the identifiability of the optimal arms in each task, we show a bandit meta-learning algorithm with an improved $\tilde{O}(N\sqrt{M \tau}+N^{1/2})$ regret.

Anomaly detection for indoor air quality (IAQ) data has become an important area of research as the quality of air is closely related to human health and well-being. However, traditional statistics and shallow machine learning-based approaches in anomaly detection in the IAQ area could not detect anomalies involving the observation of correlations across several data points (i.e., often referred to as long-term dependences). We propose a hybrid deep learning model that combines LSTM with Autoencoder for anomaly detection tasks in IAQ to address this issue. In our approach, the LSTM network is comprised of multiple LSTM cells that work with each other to learn the long-term dependences of the data in a time-series sequence. Autoencoder identifies the optimal threshold based on the reconstruction loss rates evaluated on every data across all time-series sequences. Our experimental results, based on the Dunedin CO2 time-series dataset obtained through a real-world deployment of the schools in New Zealand, demonstrate a very high and robust accuracy rate (99.50%) that outperforms other similar models.

Although mission-critical applications require the use of deep neural networks (DNNs), their continuous execution at mobile devices results in a significant increase in energy consumption. While edge offloading can decrease energy consumption, erratic patterns in channel quality, network and edge server load can lead to severe disruption of the system's key operations. An alternative approach, called split computing, generates compressed representations within the model (called "bottlenecks"), to reduce bandwidth usage and energy consumption. Prior work has proposed approaches that introduce additional layers, to the detriment of energy consumption and latency. For this reason, we propose a new framework called BottleFit, which, in addition to targeted DNN architecture modifications, includes a novel training strategy to achieve high accuracy even with strong compression rates. We apply BottleFit on cutting-edge DNN models in image classification, and show that BottleFit achieves 77.1% data compression with up to 0.6% accuracy loss on ImageNet dataset, while state of the art such as SPINN loses up to 6% in accuracy. We experimentally measure the power consumption and latency of an image classification application running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano board (GPU-based) and a Raspberry PI board (GPU-less). We show that BottleFit decreases power consumption and latency respectively by up to 49% and 89% with respect to (w.r.t.) local computing and by 37% and 55% w.r.t. edge offloading. We also compare BottleFit with state-of-the-art autoencoders-based approaches, and show that (i) BottleFit reduces power consumption and execution time respectively by up to 54% and 44% on the Jetson and 40% and 62% on Raspberry PI; (ii) the size of the head model executed on the mobile device is 83 times smaller. We publish the code repository for reproducibility of the results in this study.

Binary analysis of software is a critical step in cyber forensics applications such as program vulnerability assessment and malware detection. This involves interpreting instructions executed by software and often necessitates converting the software's binary file data to assembly language. The conversion process requires information about the binary file's target instruction set architecture (ISA). However, ISA information might not be included in binary files due to compilation errors, partial downloads, or adversarial corruption of file metadata. Machine learning (ML) is a promising methodology that can be used to identify the target ISA using binary data in the object code section of binary files. In this paper we propose a binary code feature extraction model to improve the accuracy and scalability of ML-based ISA identification methods. Our feature extraction model can be used in the absence of domain knowledge about the ISAs. Specifically, we adapt models from natural language processing (NLP) to i) identify successive byte patterns commonly observed in binary codes, ii) estimate the significance of each byte pattern to a binary file, and iii) estimate the relevance of each byte pattern in distinguishing between ISAs. We introduce character-level features of encoded binaries to identify fine-grained bit patterns inherent to each ISA. We use a dataset with binaries from 12 different ISAs to evaluate our approach. Empirical evaluations show that using our byte-level features in ML-based ISA identification results in an 8% higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art features based on byte-histograms and byte pattern signatures. We observe that character-level features allow reducing the size of the feature set by up to 16x while maintaining accuracy above 97%.

Traditional one-bit compressed stochastic gradient descent can not be directly employed in multi-hop all-reduce, a widely adopted distributed training paradigm in network-intensive high-performance computing systems such as public clouds. According to our theoretical findings, due to the cascading compression, the training process has considerable deterioration on the convergence performance. To overcome this limitation, we implement a sign-bit compression-based learning synchronization framework, Marsit. It prevents cascading compression via an elaborate bit-wise operation for unbiased sign aggregation and its specific global compensation mechanism for mitigating compression deviation. The proposed framework retains the same theoretical convergence rate as non-compression mechanisms. Experimental results demonstrate that Marsit reduces up to 35% training time while preserving the same accuracy as training without compression.

Efficient quantum compiling tactics greatly enhance the capability of quantum computers to execute complicated quantum algorithms. Due to its fundamental importance, a plethora of quantum compilers has been designed in past years. However, there are several caveats to current protocols, which are low optimality, high inference time, limited scalability, and lack of universality. To compensate for these defects, here we devise an efficient and practical quantum compiler assisted by advanced deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, i.e., data generation, deep Q-learning, and AQ* search. In this way, our protocol is compatible with various quantum machines and can be used to compile multi-qubit operators. We systematically evaluate the performance of our proposal in compiling quantum operators with both inverse-closed and inverse-free universal basis sets. In the task of single-qubit operator compiling, our proposal outperforms other RL-based quantum compilers in the measure of compiling sequence length and inference time. Meanwhile, the output solution is near-optimal, guaranteed by the Solovay-Kitaev theorem. Notably, for the inverse-free universal basis set, the achieved sequence length complexity is comparable with the inverse-based setting and dramatically advances previous methods. These empirical results contribute to improving the inverse-free Solovay-Kitaev theorem. In addition, for the first time, we demonstrate how to leverage RL-based quantum compilers to accomplish two-qubit operator compiling. The achieved results open an avenue for integrating RL with quantum compiling to unify efficiency and practicality and thus facilitate the exploration of quantum advantages.

Channel estimation is a critical task in multiple-input multiple-output digital communications that has effects on end-to-end system performance. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for channel estimation using deep score-based generative models. These models are trained to estimate the gradient of the log-prior distribution, and can be used to iteratively refine estimates, given observed measurements of a signal. We introduce a framework for training score-based generative models for wireless channels, as well as performing channel estimation using posterior sampling at test time. We derive theoretical robustness guarantees of channel estimation with posterior sampling in single-input single-output scenarios, and show that the observations regarding estimation performance are verified experimentally in MIMO channels. Our results in simulated clustered delay line channels show competitive in-distribution performance without error floors in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime, and robust out-of-distribution performance, outperforming competing deep learning methods by up to 5 dB in end-to-end communication performance, while the complexity analysis reveals how model architecture can efficiently trade performance for estimation latency.

While the general idea of self-supervised learning is identical across modalities, the actual algorithms and objectives differ widely because they were developed with a single modality in mind. To get us closer to general self-supervised learning, we present data2vec, a framework that uses the same learning method for either speech, NLP or computer vision. The core idea is to predict latent representations of the full input data based on a masked view of the input in a self-distillation setup using a standard Transformer architecture. Instead of predicting modality-specific targets such as words, visual tokens or units of human speech which are local in nature, data2vec predicts contextualized latent representations that contain information from the entire input. Experiments on the major benchmarks of speech recognition, image classification, and natural language understanding demonstrate a new state of the art or competitive performance to predominant approaches.

This paper investigates the impact of different standard environmental sound representations (spectrograms) on the recognition performance and adversarial attack robustness of a victim residual convolutional neural network, namely ResNet-18. Our main motivation for focusing on such a front-end classifier rather than other complex architectures is balancing recognition accuracy and the total number of training parameters. Herein, we measure the impact of different settings required for generating more informative Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), short-time Fourier transform (STFT), and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) representations on our front-end model. This measurement involves comparing the classification performance over the adversarial robustness. We demonstrate an inverse relationship between recognition accuracy and model robustness against six benchmarking attack algorithms on the balance of average budgets allocated by the adversary and the attack cost. Moreover, our experimental results have shown that while the ResNet-18 model trained on DWT spectrograms achieves a high recognition accuracy, attacking this model is relatively more costly for the adversary than other 2D representations. We also report some results on different convolutional neural network architectures such as ResNet-34, ResNet-56, AlexNet, and GoogLeNet, SB-CNN, and LSTM-based.  ( 2 min )

Convolutional neural network (CNN) achieves impressive success in the field of computer vision during the past few decades. As the core of CNNs, image convolution operation helps CNNs to achieve good performance on image-related tasks. However, image convolution is hard to be implemented and parallelized. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model, namely CEMNet, that can be trained in frequency domain. The most important motivation of this research is that we can use the very simple element-wise multiplication operation to replace the image convolution in frequency domain based on Cross-Correlation Theorem. We further introduce Weight Fixation Mechanism to alleviate over-fitting, and analyze the working behavior of Batch Normalization, Leaky ReLU and Dropout in frequency domain to design their counterparts for CEMNet. Also, to deal with complex inputs brought by DFT, we design two branch network structure for CEMNet. Experimental results imply that CEMNet works well in frequency domain, and achieve good performance on MNIST and CIFAR-10 databases. To our knowledge, CEMNet is the first model trained in Fourier Domain that achieves more than 70\% validation accuracy on CIFAR-10 database.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are used in medicine to tailor sequential treatment decisions to patients by considering patient heterogeneity. Common methods for learning optimal DTRs, however, have shortcomings: they are typically based on outcome prediction and not treatment effect estimation, or they use linear models that are restrictive for patient data from modern electronic health records. To address these shortcomings, we develop two novel methods for learning optimal DTRs that effectively handle complex patient data. We call our methods DTR-CT and DTR-CF. Our methods are based on a data-driven estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects using causal tree methods, specifically causal trees and causal forests, that learn non-linear relationships, control for time-varying confounding, are doubly robust, and explainable. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first that adapts causal tree methods for learning optimal DTRs. We evaluate our proposed methods using synthetic data and then apply them to real-world data from intensive care units. Our methods outperform state-of-the-art baselines in terms of cumulative regret and percentage of optimal decisions by a considerable margin. Our work improves treatment recommendations from electronic health record and is thus of direct relevance for personalized medicine.  ( 2 min )

Coresets are small, weighted summaries of larger datasets, aiming at providing provable error bounds for machine learning (ML) tasks while significantly reducing the communication and computation costs. To achieve a better trade-off between ML error bounds and costs, we propose the first framework to incorporate quantization techniques into the process of coreset construction. Specifically, we theoretically analyze the ML error bounds caused by a combination of coreset construction and quantization. Based on that, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the ML error under a fixed budget of communication cost. To improve the scalability for large datasets, we identify two proxies of the original objective function, for which efficient algorithms are developed. For the case of data on multiple nodes, we further design a novel algorithm to allocate the communication budget to the nodes while minimizing the overall ML error. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms for a variety of ML tasks. In particular, our algorithms have achieved more than 90% data reduction with less than 10% degradation in ML performance in most cases.  ( 2 min )

Real-time adaptation is imperative to the control of robots operating in complex, dynamic environments. Adaptive control laws can endow even nonlinear systems with good trajectory tracking performance, provided that any uncertain dynamics terms are linearly parameterizable with known nonlinear features. However, it is often difficult to specify such features a priori, such as for aerodynamic disturbances on rotorcraft or interaction forces between a manipulator arm and various objects. In this paper, we turn to data-driven modeling with neural networks to learn, offline from past data, an adaptive controller with an internal parametric model of these nonlinear features. Our key insight is that we can better prepare the controller for deployment with control-oriented meta-learning of features in closed-loop simulation, rather than regression-oriented meta-learning of features to fit input-output data. Specifically, we meta-learn the adaptive controller with closed-loop tracking simulation as the base-learner and the average tracking error as the meta-objective. With both fully-actuated and underactuated nonlinear planar rotorcraft subject to wind, we demonstrate that our adaptive controller outperforms other controllers trained with regression-oriented meta-learning when deployed in closed-loop for trajectory tracking control.  ( 2 min )

Multi-Task Learning is a learning paradigm that uses correlated tasks to improve performance generalization. A common way to learn multiple tasks is through the hard parameter sharing approach, in which a single architecture is used to share the same subset of parameters, creating an inductive bias between them during the training process. Due to its simplicity, potential to improve generalization, and reduce computational cost, it has gained the attention of the scientific and industrial communities. However, tasks often conflict with each other, which makes it challenging to define how the gradients of multiple tasks should be combined to allow simultaneous learning. To address this problem, we use the idea of multi-objective optimization to propose a method that takes into account temporal behaviour of the gradients to create a dynamic bias that adjust the importance of each task during the backpropagation. The result of this method is to give more attention to the tasks that are diverging or that are not being benefited during the last iterations, allowing to ensure that the simultaneous learning is heading to the performance maximization of all tasks. As a result, we empirically show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-art approaches on learning conflicting tasks. Unlike the adopted baselines, our method ensures that all tasks reach good generalization performances.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural operators can learn operators mapping between infinite-dimensional function spaces via deep neural networks and have become an emerging paradigm of scientific machine learning. However, training neural operators usually requires a large amount of high-fidelity data, which is often difficult to obtain in real engineering problems. Here, we address this challenge by using multifidelity learning, i.e., learning from multifidelity datasets. We develop a multifidelity neural operator based on a deep operator network (DeepONet). A multifidelity DeepONet includes two standard DeepONets coupled by residual learning and input augmentation. Multifidelity DeepONet significantly reduces the required amount of high-fidelity data and achieves one order of magnitude smaller error when using the same amount of high-fidelity data. We apply a multifidelity DeepONet to learn the phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE), a framework to compute nanoscale heat transport. By combining a trained multifidelity DeepONet with genetic algorithm or topology optimization, we demonstrate a fast solver for the inverse design of BTE problems.  ( 2 min )

Heart failure occurs when the heart is not able to pump blood and oxygen to support other organs in the body as it should. Treatments include medications and sometimes hospitalization. Patients with heart failure can have both cardiovascular as well as non-cardiovascular comorbidities. Clinical notes of patients with heart failure can be analyzed to gain insight into the topics discussed in these notes and the major comorbidities in these patients. In this regard, we apply machine learning techniques, such as topic modeling, to identify the major themes found in the clinical notes specific to the procedures performed on 1,200 patients admitted for heart failure at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health). Topic modeling revealed five hidden themes in these clinical notes, including one related to heart disease comorbidities.  ( 2 min )

Computing systems are omnipresent; their sustainability has become crucial for our society. A key aspect of this sustainability is the ability of computing systems to cope with the continuous change they face, ranging from dynamic operating conditions, to changing goals, and technological progress. While we are able to engineer smart computing systems that autonomously deal with various types of changes, handling unanticipated changes requires system evolution, which remains in essence a human-centered process. This will eventually become unmanageable. To break through the status quo, we put forward an arguable opinion for the vision of self-evolving computing systems that are equipped with an evolutionary engine enabling them to evolve autonomously. Specifically, when a self-evolving computing system detects conditions outside its operational domain, such as an anomaly or a new goal, it activates an evolutionary engine that runs online experiments to determine how the system needs to evolve to deal with the changes, thereby evolving its architecture. During this process the engine can integrate new computing elements that are provided by computing warehouses. These computing elements provide specifications and procedures enabling their automatic integration. We motivate the need for self-evolving computing systems in light of the state of the art, outline a conceptual architecture of self-evolving computing systems, and illustrate the architecture for a future smart city mobility system that needs to evolve continuously with changing conditions. To conclude, we highlight key research challenges to realize the vision of self-evolving computing systems.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we propose an iterative self-training framework for sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation to facilitate cost-effective robotic grasping. Given a bin-picking scenario, we establish a photo-realistic simulator to synthesize abundant virtual data, and use this to train an initial pose estimation network. This network then takes the role of a teacher model, which generates pose predictions for unlabeled real data. With these predictions, we further design a comprehensive adaptive selection scheme to distinguish reliable results, and leverage them as pseudo labels to update a student model for pose estimation on real data. To continuously improve the quality of pseudo labels, we iterate the above steps by taking the trained student model as a new teacher and re-label real data using the refined teacher model. We evaluate our method on a public benchmark and our newly-released dataset, achieving an ADD(-S) improvement of 11.49% and 22.62% respectively. Our method is also able to improve robotic bin-picking success by 19.54%, demonstrating the potential of iterative sim-to-real solutions for robotic applications.  ( 2 min )

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is a noninvasive tool to reveal metabolic information. One challenge of 1H-MRS is the low Signal-Noise Ratio (SNR). To improve the SNR, a typical approach is to perform Signal Averaging (SA) with M repeated samples. The data acquisition time, however, is increased by M times accordingly, and a complete clinical MRS scan takes approximately 10 minutes at a common setting M=128. Recently, deep learning has been introduced to improve the SNR but most of them use the simulated data as the training set. This may hinder the MRS applications since some potential differences, such as acquisition system imperfections, and physiological and psychologic conditions may exist between the simulated and in vivo data. Here, we proposed a new scheme that purely used the repeated samples of realistic data. A deep learning model, Refusion Long Short-Term Memory (ReLSTM), was designed to learn the mapping from the low SNR time-domain data (24 SA) to the high SNR one (128 SA). Experiments on the in vivo brain spectra of 7 healthy subjects, 2 brain tumor patients and 1 cerebral infarction patient showed that only using 20% repeated samples, the denoised spectra by ReLSTM could provide comparable estimated concentrations of metabolites to 128 SA. Compared with the state-of-the-art low-rank denoising method, the ReLSTM achieved the lower relative error and the Cram\'er-Rao lower bounds in quantifying some important biomarkers. In summary, ReLSTM can perform high-fidelity denoising of the spectra under fast acquisition (24 SA), which would be valuable to MRS clinical studies.  ( 2 min )

This paper analyzes three formal models of Transformer encoders that differ in the form of their self-attention mechanism: unique hard attention (UHAT); generalized unique hard attention (GUHAT), which generalizes UHAT; and averaging hard attention (AHAT). We show that UHAT and GUHAT Transformers, viewed as string acceptors, can only recognize formal languages in the complexity class AC$^0$, the class of languages recognizable by families of Boolean circuits of constant depth and polynomial size. This upper bound subsumes Hahn's (2020) results that GUHAT cannot recognize the DYCK languages or the PARITY language, since those languages are outside AC$^0$ (Furst et al., 1984). In contrast, the non-AC$^0$ languages MAJORITY and DYCK-1 are recognizable by AHAT networks, implying that AHAT can recognize languages that UHAT and GUHAT cannot.  ( 2 min )

Content based providers transmits real time complex signal such as video data from one region to another. During this transmission process, the signals usually end up distorted or degraded where the actual information present in the video is lost. This normally happens in the streaming video services applications. Hence there is a need to know the level of degradation that happened in the receiver side. This video degradation can be estimated by network state parameters like data rate and packet loss values. Our proposed solution vQoS GAN (video Quality of Service Generative Adversarial Network) can estimate the network state parameters from the degraded received video data using a deep learning approach of semi supervised generative adversarial network algorithm. A robust and unique design of deep learning network model has been trained with the video data along with data rate and packet loss class labels and achieves over 95 percent of training accuracy. The proposed semi supervised generative adversarial network can additionally reconstruct the degraded video data to its original form for a better end user experience.  ( 2 min )

Given a dataset of input states, measurements, and probabilities, is it possible to efficiently predict the measurement probabilities associated with a quantum circuit? Recent work of Caro and Datta (2020) studied the problem of PAC learning quantum circuits in an information theoretic sense, leaving open questions of computational efficiency. In particular, one candidate class of circuits for which an efficient learner might have been possible was that of Clifford circuits, since the corresponding set of states generated by such circuits, called stabilizer states, are known to be efficiently PAC learnable (Rocchetto 2018). Here we provide a negative result, showing that proper learning of CNOT circuits is hard for classical learners unless $\textsf{RP} = \textsf{NP}$. As the classical analogue and subset of Clifford circuits, this naturally leads to a hardness result for Clifford circuits as well. Additionally, we show that if $\textsf{RP} = \textsf{NP}$ then there would exist efficient proper learning algorithms for CNOT and Clifford circuits. By similar arguments, we also find that an efficient proper quantum learner for such circuits exists if and only if $\textsf{NP} \subseteq \textsf{RQP}$.  ( 2 min )

In recent years, neural networks and especially deep architectures have received substantial attention for EEG signal analysis in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In this ongoing research area, the end-to-end models are more favoured than traditional approaches requiring signal transformation pre-classification. They can eliminate the need for prior information from experts and the extraction of handcrafted features. However, although several deep learning algorithms have been already proposed in the literature, achieving high accuracies for classifying motor movements or mental tasks, they often face a lack of interpretability and therefore are not quite favoured by the neuroscience community. The reasons behind this issue can be the high number of parameters and the sensitivity of deep neural networks to capture tiny yet unrelated discriminative features. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture called EEG-ITNet and a more comprehensible method to visualise the network learned patterns. Using inception modules and causal convolutions with dilation, our model can extract rich spectral, spatial, and temporal information from multi-channel EEG signals with less complexity (in terms of the number of trainable parameters) than other existing end-to-end architectures, such as EEG-Inception and EEG-TCNet. By an exhaustive evaluation on dataset 2a from BCI competition IV and OpenBMI motor imagery dataset, EEG-ITNet shows up to 5.9\% improvement in the classification accuracy in different scenarios with statistical significance compared to its competitors. We also comprehensively explain and support the validity of network illustration from a neuroscientific perspective. We have also made our code open at https://github.com/AbbasSalami/EEG-ITNet  ( 2 min )

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for anatomical structure inspection in clinical diagnosis. The training of new sonographers and deep learning based algorithms for US image analysis usually requires a large amount of data. However, obtaining and labeling large-scale US imaging data are not easy tasks, especially for diseases with low incidence. Realistic US image synthesis can alleviate this problem to a great extent. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based image synthesis framework. Our main contributions include: 1) we present the first work that can synthesize realistic B-mode US images with high-resolution and customized texture editing features; 2) to enhance structural details of generated images, we propose to introduce auxiliary sketch guidance into a conditional GAN. We superpose the edge sketch onto the object mask and use the composite mask as the network input; 3) to generate high-resolution US images, we adopt a progressive training strategy to gradually generate high-resolution images from low-resolution images. In addition, a feature loss is proposed to minimize the difference of high-level features between the generated and real images, which further improves the quality of generated images; 4) the proposed US image synthesis method is quite universal and can also be generalized to the US images of other anatomical structures besides the three ones tested in our study (lung, hip joint, and ovary); 5) extensive experiments on three large US image datasets are conducted to validate our method. Ablation studies, customized texture editing, user studies, and segmentation tests demonstrate promising results of our method in synthesizing realistic US images.  ( 2 min )

The problem of balancing conflicting needs is fundamental to intelligence. Standard reinforcement learning algorithms maximize a scalar reward, which requires combining different objective-specific rewards into a single number. Alternatively, different objectives could also be combined at the level of action value, such that specialist modules responsible for different objectives submit different action suggestions to a decision process, each based on rewards that are independent of one another. In this work, we explore the potential benefits of this alternative strategy. We investigate a biologically relevant multi-objective problem, the continual homeostasis of a set of variables, and compare a monolithic deep Q-network to a modular network with a dedicated Q-learner for each variable. We find that the modular agent: a) requires minimal exogenously determined exploration; b) has improved sample efficiency; and c) is more robust to out-of-domain perturbation.  ( 2 min )

Considering smooth mappings from input vectors to continuous targets, our goal is to characterise subspaces of the input domain, which are invariant under such mappings. Thus, we want to characterise manifolds implicitly defined by level sets. Specifically, this characterisation should be of a global parametric form, which is especially useful for different informed data exploration tasks, such as building grid-based approximations, sampling points along the level curves, or finding trajectories on the manifold. However, global parameterisations can only exist if the level sets are connected. For this purpose, we introduce a novel and flexible class of neural networks that generalise input-convex networks. These networks represent functions that are guaranteed to have connected level sets forming smooth manifolds on the input space. We further show that global parameterisations of these level sets can be always found efficiently. Lastly, we demonstrate that our novel technique for characterising invariances is a powerful generative data exploration tool in real-world applications, such as computational chemistry.  ( 2 min )

Skill routing is an important component in large-scale conversational systems. In contrast to traditional rule-based skill routing, state-of-the-art systems use a model-based approach to enable natural conversations. To provide supervision signal required to train such models, ideas such as human annotation, replication of a rule-based system, relabeling based on user paraphrases, and bandit-based learning were suggested. However, these approaches: (a) do not scale in terms of the number of skills and skill on-boarding, (b) require a very costly expert annotation/rule-design, (c) introduce risks in the user experience with each model update. In this paper, we present a scalable self-learning approach to explore routing alternatives without causing abrupt policy changes that break the user experience, learn from the user interaction, and incrementally improve the routing via frequent model refreshes. To enable such robust frequent model updates, we suggest a simple and effective approach that ensures controlled policy updates for individual domains, followed by an off-policy evaluation for making deployment decisions without any need for lengthy A/B experimentation. We conduct various offline and online A/B experiments on a commercial large-scale conversational system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world production settings.

This paper presents a holistic approach to saliency-guided visual attention modeling (SVAM) for use by autonomous underwater robots. Our proposed model, named SVAM-Net, integrates deep visual features at various scales and semantics for effective salient object detection (SOD) in natural underwater images. The SVAM-Net architecture is configured in a unique way to jointly accommodate bottom-up and top-down learning within two separate branches of the network while sharing the same encoding layers. We design dedicated spatial attention modules (SAMs) along these learning pathways to exploit the coarse-level and fine-level semantic features for SOD at four stages of abstractions. The bottom-up branch performs a rough yet reasonably accurate saliency estimation at a fast rate, whereas the deeper top-down branch incorporates a residual refinement module (RRM) that provides fine-grained localization of the salient objects. Extensive performance evaluation of SVAM-Net on benchmark datasets clearly demonstrates its effectiveness for underwater SOD. We also validate its generalization performance by several ocean trials' data that include test images of diverse underwater scenes and waterbodies, and also images with unseen natural objects. Moreover, we analyze its computational feasibility for robotic deployments and demonstrate its utility in several important use cases of visual attention modeling.

Sharing medical data between institutions is difficult in practice due to data protection laws and official procedures within institutions. Therefore, most existing algorithms are trained on relatively small electroencephalogram (EEG) data sets which is likely to be detrimental to prediction accuracy. In this work, we simulate a case when the data can not be shared by splitting the publicly available data set into disjoint sets representing data in individual institutions. We propose to train a (local) detector in each institution and aggregate their individual predictions into one final prediction. Four aggregation schemes are compared, namely, the majority vote, the mean, the weighted mean and the Dawid-Skene method. The approach allows different detector architectures amongst the institutions. The method was validated on an independent data set using only a subset of EEG channels. The ensemble reaches accuracy comparable to a single detector trained on all the data when sufficient amount of data is available in each institution. The weighted mean aggregation scheme showed best overall performance, it was only marginally outperformed by the Dawid-Skene method when local detectors approach performance of a single detector trained on all available data.

The most significant barrier to the advancement of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is its demand for large computational resources, which hinders scientifically sound empirical evaluations of NAS methods. Tabular NAS benchmarks have alleviated this problem substantially, making it possible to properly evaluate NAS methods in seconds on commodity machines. However, an unintended consequence of tabular NAS benchmarks has been a focus on extremely small architectural search spaces since their construction relies on exhaustive evaluations of the space. This leads to unrealistic results that do not transfer to larger spaces. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose a methodology to create cheap NAS surrogate benchmarks for arbitrary search spaces. We exemplify this approach by creating surrogate NAS benchmarks on the existing tabular NAS-Bench-101 and on two widely used NAS search spaces with up to $10^{21}$ architectures ($10^{13}$ times larger than any previous tabular NAS benchmark). We show that surrogate NAS benchmarks can model the true performance of architectures better than tabular benchmarks (at a small fraction of the cost), that they lead to faithful estimates of how well different NAS methods work on the original non-surrogate benchmark, and that they can generate new scientific insight. We open-source all our code and believe that surrogate NAS benchmarks are an indispensable tool to extend scientifically sound work on NAS to large and exciting search spaces.

Graph neural networks (GNN) are very popular methods in machine learning and have been applied very successfully to the prediction of the properties of molecules and materials. First-order GNNs are well known to be incomplete, i.e., there exist graphs that are distinct but appear identical when seen through the lens of the GNN. More complicated schemes have thus been designed to increase their resolving power. Applications to molecules (and more generally, point clouds), however, add a geometric dimension to the problem. The most straightforward and prevalent approach to construct graph representation for molecules regards atoms as vertices in a graph and draws a bond between each pair of atoms within a chosen cutoff. Bonds can be decorated with the distance between atoms, and the resulting "distance graph NNs" (dGNN) have empirically demonstrated excellent resolving power and are widely used in chemical ML, with all known indistinguishable graphs being resolved in the fully-connected limit. Here we show that even for the restricted case of fully-connected graphs induced by 3D atom clouds dGNNs are not complete. We construct pairs of distinct point clouds that generate graphs that, for any cutoff radius, are equivalent based on a first-order Weisfeiler-Lehman test. This class of degenerate structures includes chemically-plausible configurations, setting an ultimate limit to the expressive power of some of the well-established GNN architectures for atomistic machine learning. Models that explicitly use angular or directional information in the description of atomic environments can resolve these degeneracies.

Counterfactual explanations have been widely studied in explainability, with a range of application dependent methods emerging in fairness, recourse and model understanding. However, the major shortcoming associated with these methods is their inability to provide explanations beyond the local or instance-level. While some works touch upon the notion of a global explanation, typically suggesting to aggregate masses of local explanations in the hope of ascertaining global properties, few provide frameworks that are either reliable or computationally tractable. Meanwhile, practitioners are requesting more efficient and interactive explainability tools. We take this opportunity to investigate existing global methods, with a focus on implementing and improving Actionable Recourse Summaries (AReS), the only known global counterfactual explanation framework for recourse.

We consider the problem of estimating the interacting neighborhood of a Markov Random Field model with finite support and homogeneous pairwise interactions based on relative positions of a two-dimensional lattice. Using a Bayesian framework, we propose a Reversible Jump Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithm that jumps across subsets of a maximal range neighborhood, allowing us to perform model selection based on a marginal pseudoposterior distribution of models.

It is known that when the statistical models are singular, i.e., the Fisher information matrix at the true parameter is degenerate, the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm takes polynomial number of steps in terms of the sample size $n$ to converge to a final statistical radius around the true parameter, which can be unsatisfactory for the application. To further improve that computational complexity, we consider the utilization of the second-order information in the design of optimization algorithms. Specifically, we study the normalized gradient descent (NormGD) algorithm for solving parameter estimation in parametric statistical models, which is a variant of gradient descent algorithm whose step size is scaled by the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix of the empirical loss function of statistical models. When the population loss function, i.e., the limit of the empirical loss function when $n$ goes to infinity, is homogeneous in all directions, we demonstrate that the NormGD iterates reach a final statistical radius around the true parameter after a logarithmic number of iterations in terms of $n$. Therefore, for fixed dimension $d$, the NormGD algorithm achieves the optimal overall computational complexity $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to reach the final statistical radius. This computational complexity is cheaper than that of the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm, which is of the order $\mathcal{O}(n^{\tau})$ for some $\tau > 1$, to reach the same statistical radius. We illustrate our general theory under two statistical models: generalized linear models and mixture models, and experimental results support our prediction with general theory.

In artificial neural networks, understanding the contributions of input features on the prediction fosters model explainability and delivers relevant information about the dataset. While typical setups for feature importance ranking assess input features individually, in this study, we go one step further and rank the importance of groups of features, denoted as feature-blocks. A feature-block can contain features of a specific type or features derived from a particular source, which are presented to the neural network in separate input branches (multiblock ANNs). This work presents three methods pursuing distinct strategies to rank features in multiblock ANNs by their importance: (1) a composite strategy building on individual feature importance rankings, (2) a knock-in, and (3) a knock-out strategy. While the composite strategy builds on state-of-the-art feature importance rankings, knock-in and knock-out strategies evaluate the block as a whole via a mutual information criterion. Our experiments consist of a simulation study validating all three approaches, followed by a case study on two distinct real-world datasets to compare the strategies. We conclude that each strategy has its merits for specific application scenarios.

In black-box optimization problems, we aim to maximize an unknown objective function, where the function is only accessible through feedbacks of an evaluation or simulation oracle. In real-life, the feedbacks of such oracles are often noisy and available after some unknown delay that may depend on the computation time of the oracle. Additionally, if the exact evaluations are expensive but coarse approximations are available at a lower cost, the feedbacks can have multi-fidelity. In order to address this problem, we propose a generic extension of hierarchical optimistic tree search (HOO), called ProCrastinated Tree Search (PCTS), that flexibly accommodates a delay and noise-tolerant bandit algorithm. We provide a generic proof technique to quantify regret of PCTS under delayed, noisy, and multi-fidelity feedbacks. Specifically, we derive regret bounds of PCTS enabled with delayed-UCB1 (DUCB1) and delayed-UCB-V (DUCBV) algorithms. Given a horizon $T$, PCTS retains the regret bound of non-delayed HOO for expected delay of $O(\log T)$ and worsens by $O(T^{\frac{1-\alpha}{d+2}})$ for expected delays of $O(T^{1-\alpha})$ for $\alpha \in (0,1]$. We experimentally validate on multiple synthetic functions and hyperparameter tuning problems that PCTS outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box optimization methods for feedbacks with different noise levels, delays, and fidelity.

We investigate the fairness concerns of training a machine learning model using data with missing values. Even though there are a number of fairness intervention methods in the literature, most of them require a complete training set as input. In practice, data can have missing values, and data missing patterns can depend on group attributes (e.g. gender or race). Simply applying off-the-shelf fair learning algorithms to an imputed dataset may lead to an unfair model. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze different sources of discrimination risks when training with an imputed dataset. Then, we propose an integrated approach based on decision trees that does not require a separate process of imputation and learning. Instead, we train a tree with missing incorporated as attribute (MIA), which does not require explicit imputation, and we optimize a fairness-regularized objective function. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing fairness intervention methods applied to an imputed dataset, through several experiments on real-world datasets.

We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed stochastic bandit tasks. The tasks may be designed by an adversary, but the adversary is constrained to choose the optimal arm of each task in a smaller (but unknown) subset of $M$ arms. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting), and the number of tasks $N$ as well as the total number of rounds $T$ are known ($N$ could be unknown in the meta-learning setting). We design an algorithm based on a reduction to bandit submodular maximization, and show that its regret in both settings is smaller than the simple baseline of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{KNT})$ that can be obtained by using standard algorithms designed for non-stationary bandit problems. For the bandit meta-learning problem with fixed task length $\tau$, we show that the regret of the algorithm is bounded as $\tilde{O}(N\sqrt{M \tau}+N^{2/3})$. Under additional assumptions on the identifiability of the optimal arms in each task, we show a bandit meta-learning algorithm with an improved $\tilde{O}(N\sqrt{M \tau}+N^{1/2})$ regret.

We study the problem of expert advice under partial bandit feedback setting and create a sequential minimax optimal algorithm. Our algorithm works with a more general partial monitoring setting, where, in contrast to the classical bandit feedback, the losses can be revealed in an adversarial manner. Our algorithm adopts a universal prediction perspective, whose performance is analyzed with regret against a general expert selection sequence. The regret we study is against a general competition class that covers many settings (such as the switching or contextual experts settings) and the expert selection sequences in the competition class are determined by the application at hand. Our regret bounds are second order bounds in terms of the sum of squared losses and the normalized regret of our algorithm is invariant under arbitrary affine transforms of the loss sequence. Our algorithm is truly online and does not use any preliminary information about the loss sequences.  ( 2 min )

Disparate treatment occurs when a machine learning model yields different decisions for individuals based on a sensitive attribute (e.g., age, sex). In domains where prediction accuracy is paramount, it could potentially be acceptable to fit a model which exhibits disparate treatment. To evaluate the effect of disparate treatment, we compare the performance of split classifiers (i.e., classifiers trained and deployed separately on each group) with group-blind classifiers (i.e., classifiers which do not use a sensitive attribute). We introduce the benefit-of-splitting for quantifying the performance improvement by splitting classifiers. Computing the benefit-of-splitting directly from its definition could be intractable since it involves solving optimization problems over an infinite-dimensional functional space. Under different performance measures, we (i) prove an equivalent expression for the benefit-of-splitting which can be efficiently computed by solving small-scale convex programs; (ii) provide sharp upper and lower bounds for the benefit-of-splitting which reveal precise conditions where a group-blind classifier will always suffer from a non-trivial performance gap from the split classifiers. In the finite sample regime, splitting is not necessarily beneficial and we provide data-dependent bounds to understand this effect. Finally, we validate our theoretical results through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.  ( 2 min )

In this work, a novel algorithm called SVM with Shape-adaptive Reconstruction and Smoothed Total Variation (SaR-SVM-STV) is introduced to classify hyperspectral images, which makes full use of spatial and spectral information. The Shape-adaptive Reconstruction (SaR) is introduced to preprocess each pixel based on the Pearson Correlation between pixels in its shape-adaptive (SA) region. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are trained to estimate the pixel-wise probability maps of each class. Then the Smoothed Total Variation (STV) model is applied to denoise and generate the final classification map. Experiments show that SaR-SVM-STV outperforms the SVM-STV method with a few training labels, demonstrating the significance of reconstructing hyperspectral images before classification.  ( 2 min )

Deep Learning (DL) methods have emerged as one of the most powerful tools for functional approximation and prediction. While the representation properties of DL have been well studied, uncertainty quantification remains challenging and largely unexplored. Data augmentation techniques are a natural approach to provide uncertainty quantification and to incorporate stochastic Monte Carlo search into stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods. The purpose of our paper is to show that training DL architectures with data augmentation leads to efficiency gains. We use the theory of scale mixtures of normals to derive data augmentation strategies for deep learning. This allows variants of the expectation-maximization and MCMC algorithms to be brought to bear on these high dimensional nonlinear deep learning models. To demonstrate our methodology, we develop data augmentation algorithms for a variety of commonly used activation functions: logit, ReLU, leaky ReLU and SVM. Our methodology is compared to traditional stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation. Our optimization procedure leads to a version of iteratively re-weighted least squares and can be implemented at scale with accelerated linear algebra methods providing substantial improvement in speed. We illustrate our methodology on a number of standard datasets. Finally, we conclude with directions for future research.  ( 2 min )

We consider observations $(X,y)$ from single index models with unknown link function, Gaussian covariates and a regularized M-estimator $\hat\beta$ constructed from convex loss function and regularizer. In the regime where sample size $n$ and dimension $p$ are both increasing such that $p/n$ has a finite limit, the behavior of the empirical distribution of $\hat\beta$ and the predicted values $X\hat\beta$ has been previously characterized in a number of models: The empirical distributions are known to converge to proximal operators of the loss and penalty in a related Gaussian sequence model, which captures the interplay between ratio $p/n$, loss, regularization and the data generating process. This connection between$(\hat\beta,X\hat\beta)$ and the corresponding proximal operators require solving fixed-point equations that typically involve unobservable quantities such as the prior distribution on the index or the link function. This paper develops a different theory to describe the empirical distribution of $\hat\beta$ and $X\hat\beta$: Approximations of $(\hat\beta,X\hat\beta)$ in terms of proximal operators are provided that only involve observable adjustments. These proposed observable adjustments are data-driven, e.g., do not require prior knowledge of the index or the link function. These new adjustments yield confidence intervals for individual components of the index, as well as estimators of the correlation of $\hat\beta$ with the index. The interplay between loss, regularization and the model is thus captured in a data-driven manner, without solving the fixed-point equations studied in previous works. The results apply to both strongly convex regularizers and unregularized M-estimation. Simulations are provided for the square and logistic loss in single index models including logistic regression and 1-bit compressed sensing with 20\% corrupted bits.  ( 2 min )

The spectra of random feature matrices provide essential information on the conditioning of the linear system used in random feature regression problems and are thus connected to the consistency and generalization of random feature models. Random feature matrices are asymmetric rectangular nonlinear matrices depending on two input variables, the data and the weights, which can make their characterization challenging. We consider two settings for the two input variables, either both are random variables or one is a random variable and the other is well-separated, i.e. there is a minimum distance between points. With conditions on the dimension, the complexity ratio, and the sampling variance, we show that the singular values of these matrices concentrate near their full expectation and near one with high-probability. In particular, since the dimension depends only on the logarithm of the number of random weights or the number of data points, our complexity bounds can be achieved even in moderate dimensions for many practical setting. The theoretical results are verified with numerical experiments.  ( 2 min )

The Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM; Tobar et al., 2015a) is a model for signals with complex spectral structure. A significant limitation of the GPCM is that it assumes a rapidly decaying spectrum: it can only model smooth signals. Moreover, inference in the GPCM currently requires (1) a mean-field assumption, resulting in poorly calibrated uncertainties, and (2) a tedious variational optimisation of large covariance matrices. We redesign the GPCM model to induce a richer distribution over the spectrum with relaxed assumptions about smoothness: the Causal Gaussian Process Convolution Model (CGPCM) introduces a causality assumption into the GPCM, and the Rough Gaussian Process Convolution Model (RGPCM) can be interpreted as a Bayesian nonparametric generalisation of the fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We also propose a more effective variational inference scheme, going beyond the mean-field assumption: we design a Gibbs sampler which directly samples from the optimal variational solution, circumventing any variational optimisation entirely. The proposed variations of the GPCM are validated in experiments on synthetic and real-world data, showing promising results.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we propose Wasserstein Isometric Mapping (Wassmap), a parameter-free nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that provides solutions to some drawbacks in existing global nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms in imaging applications. Wassmap represents images via probability measures in Wasserstein space, then uses pairwise quadratic Wasserstein distances between the associated measures to produce a low-dimensional, approximately isometric embedding. We show that the algorithm is able to exactly recover parameters of some image manifolds including those generated by translations or dilations of a fixed generating measure. Additionally, we show that a discrete version of the algorithm retrieves parameters from manifolds generated from discrete measures by providing a theoretical bridge to transfer recovery results from functional data to discrete data. Testing of the proposed algorithms on various image data manifolds show that Wassmap yields good embeddings compared with other global techniques.  ( 2 min )

Making an informed decision -- for example, when choosing a career or housing -- requires knowledge about the available options. Such knowledge is generally acquired through costly trial and error, but this learning process can be disrupted by competition. In this work, we study how competition affects the long-term outcomes of individuals as they learn. We build on a line of work that models this setting as a two-sided matching market with bandit learners. A recent result in this area states that it is impossible to simultaneously guarantee two natural desiderata: stability and low optimal regret for all agents. Resource-allocating platforms can point to this result as a justification for assigning good long-term outcomes to some agents and poor ones to others. We show that this impossibility need not hold true. In particular, by modeling two additional components of competition -- namely, costs and transfers -- we prove that it is possible to simultaneously guarantee four desiderata: stability, low optimal regret, fairness in the distribution of regret, and high social welfare.  ( 2 min )

Sampling biases in training data are a major source of algorithmic biases in machine learning systems. Although there are many methods that attempt to mitigate such algorithmic biases during training, the most direct and obvious way is simply collecting more representative training data. In this paper, we consider the task of assembling a training dataset in which minority groups are adequately represented from a given set of data sources. In essence, this is an adaptive sampling problem to determine if a given point lies in the convex hull of the means from a set of unknown distributions. We present adaptive sampling methods to determine, with high confidence, whether it is possible to assemble a representative dataset from the given data sources. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our policies in simulations in the Bernoulli and a multinomial setting.  ( 2 min )

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retailing to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings -- vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words -- through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word "positive" typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient is tested positive for a disease. Intuitively, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings/usages. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our estimator, proving that it can achieve the same accuracy (compared to not transfer learning) with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.  ( 2 min )

Previous security research efforts orbiting around graphs have been exclusively focusing on either (de-)anonymizing the graphs or understanding the security and privacy issues of graph neural networks. Little attention has been paid to understand the privacy risks of integrating the output from graph embedding models (e.g., node embeddings) with complex downstream machine learning pipelines. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a novel model-agnostic graph recovery attack that exploits the implicit graph structural information preserved in the embeddings of graph nodes. We show that an adversary can recover edges with decent accuracy by only gaining access to the node embedding matrix of the original graph without interactions with the node embedding models. We demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our graph recovery attack through extensive experiments.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning models are mostly used in an offline inference fashion. However, this strongly limits the use of these models inside audio generation setups, as most creative workflows are based on real-time digital signal processing. Although approaches based on recurrent networks can be naturally adapted to this buffer-based computation, the use of convolutions still poses some serious challenges. To tackle this issue, the use of causal streaming convolutions have been proposed. However, this requires specific complexified training and can impact the resulting audio quality. In this paper, we introduce a new method allowing to produce non-causal streaming models. This allows to make any convolutional model compatible with real-time buffer-based processing. As our method is based on a post-training reconfiguration of the model, we show that it is able to transform models trained without causal constraints into a streaming model. We show how our method can be adapted to fit complex architectures with parallel branches. To evaluate our method, we apply it on the recent RAVE model, which provides high-quality real-time audio synthesis. We test our approach on multiple music and speech datasets and show that it is faster than overlap-add methods, while having no impact on the generation quality. Finally, we introduce two open-source implementation of our work as Max/MSP and PureData externals, and as a VST audio plugin. This allows to endow traditional digital audio workstation with real-time neural audio synthesis on a laptop CPU.  ( 2 min )

We introduce kernel thinning, a new procedure for compressing a distribution $\mathbb{P}$ more effectively than i.i.d. sampling or standard thinning. Given a suitable reproducing kernel $\mathbf{k}$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time, kernel thinning compresses an $n$-point approximation to $\mathbb{P}$ into a $\sqrt{n}$-point approximation with comparable worst-case integration error across the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. With high probability, the maximum discrepancy in integration error is $\mathcal{O}_d(n^{-1/2}\sqrt{\log n})$ for compactly supported $\mathbb{P}$ and $\mathcal{O}_d(n^{-\frac{1}{2}} (\log n)^{(d+1)/2}\sqrt{\log\log n})$ for sub-exponential $\mathbb{P}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In contrast, an equal-sized i.i.d. sample from $\mathbb{P}$ suffers $\Omega(n^{-1/4})$ integration error. Our sub-exponential guarantees resemble the classical quasi-Monte Carlo error rates for uniform $\mathbb{P}$ on $[0,1]^d$ but apply to general distributions on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and a wide range of common kernels. We use our results to derive explicit non-asymptotic maximum mean discrepancy bounds for Gaussian, Mat\'ern, and B-spline kernels and present two vignettes illustrating the practical benefits of kernel thinning over i.i.d. sampling and standard Markov chain Monte Carlo thinning, in dimensions $d=2$ through $100$.  ( 2 min )

Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference algorithm can be used as a probabilistic programming back-end that is simultaneously reliable, efficient, black-box, and general. Probabilistic programming languages often choose a single algorithm to apply to a given problem, thus inheriting its limitations. While substantial work has been done both to formalise probabilistic programming and to improve efficiency of inference, there has been little work that makes use of the available program structure, by formally analysing it, to better utilise the underlying inference algorithm. This dissertation presents three novel techniques (both static and dynamic), which aim to improve probabilistic programming using program analysis. The techniques analyse a probabilistic program and adapt it to make inference more efficient, sometimes in a way that would have been tedious or impossible to do by hand.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents new machine learning approaches to approximate the solutions of optimal stopping problems. The key idea of these methods is to use neural networks, where the parameters of the hidden layers are generated randomly and only the last layer is trained, in order to approximate the continuation value. Our approaches are applicable to high dimensional problems where the existing approaches become increasingly impractical. In addition, since our approaches can be optimized using simple linear regression, they are easy to implement and theoretical guarantees are provided. Our randomized reinforcement learning approach and randomized recurrent neural network approach outperform the state-of-the-art and other relevant machine learning approaches in Markovian and non-Markovian examples, respectively. In particular, we test our approaches on Black-Scholes, Heston, rough Heston and fractional Brownian motion. Moreover, we show that they can also be used to efficiently compute Greeks of American options.  ( 2 min )

The use of episodic memory in continual learning has demonstrated effectiveness for alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In recent studies, gradient-based approaches have been developed to make more efficient use of compact episodic memory. Such approaches refine the gradients resulting from new samples by those from memorized samples, aiming to reduce the diversity of gradients from different tasks. In this paper, we clarify the relation between diversity of gradients and discriminativeness of representations, showing shared as well as conflicting interests between Deep Metric Learning and continual learning, thus demonstrating pros and cons of learning discriminative representations in continual learning. Based on these findings, we propose a simple method -- Semi-Discriminative Representation Loss (SDRL) -- for continual learning. In comparison with state-of-the-art methods, SDRL shows better performance with low computational cost on multiple benchmark tasks in the setting of online continual learning.  ( 2 min )

Recently there has been sustained interest in modifying prediction algorithms to satisfy fairness constraints. These constraints are typically complex nonlinear functionals of the observed data distribution. Focusing on the path-specific causal constraints proposed by Nabi and Shpitser (2018), we introduce new theoretical results and optimization techniques to make model training easier and more accurate. Specifically, we show how to reparameterize the observed data likelihood such that fairness constraints correspond directly to parameters that appear in the likelihood, transforming a complex constrained optimization objective into a simple optimization problem with box constraints. We also exploit methods from empirical likelihood theory in statistics to improve predictive performance by constraining baseline covariates, without requiring parametric models. We combine the merits of both proposals to optimize a hybrid reparameterized likelihood. The techniques presented here should be applicable more broadly to fair prediction proposals that impose constraints on predictive models.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are used in medicine to tailor sequential treatment decisions to patients by considering patient heterogeneity. Common methods for learning optimal DTRs, however, have shortcomings: they are typically based on outcome prediction and not treatment effect estimation, or they use linear models that are restrictive for patient data from modern electronic health records. To address these shortcomings, we develop two novel methods for learning optimal DTRs that effectively handle complex patient data. We call our methods DTR-CT and DTR-CF. Our methods are based on a data-driven estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects using causal tree methods, specifically causal trees and causal forests, that learn non-linear relationships, control for time-varying confounding, are doubly robust, and explainable. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first that adapts causal tree methods for learning optimal DTRs. We evaluate our proposed methods using synthetic data and then apply them to real-world data from intensive care units. Our methods outperform state-of-the-art baselines in terms of cumulative regret and percentage of optimal decisions by a considerable margin. Our work improves treatment recommendations from electronic health record and is thus of direct relevance for personalized medicine.  ( 2 min )

Many problems in engineering and statistics involve both predictive forecasting and decision-based optimization. Traditionally, predictive models are optimized independently from the final decision-based optimization problem. In contrast, a `smart, predict then optimize' (SPO) framework optimizes prediction models to explicitly minimize the final downstream decision loss. In this paper we present dboost, a gradient boosting algorithm for training prediction model ensembles to minimize decision regret. The dboost framework supports any convex optimization program that can be cast as convex quadratic cone program and gradient boosting is performed by implicit differentiation of a custom fixed-point mapping. To our knowledge, the dboost framework is the first general purpose implementation of gradient boosting to predict and optimize problems. Experimental results comparing with state-of-the-art SPO methods show that dboost can further reduce out-of-sample decision regret.  ( 2 min )

We derive streamlined mean field variational Bayes algorithms for fitting linear mixed models with crossed random effects. In the most general situation, where the dimensions of the crossed groups are arbitrarily large, streamlining is hindered by lack of sparseness in the underlying least squares system. Because of this fact we also consider a hierarchy of relaxations of the mean field product restriction. The least stringent product restriction delivers a high degree of inferential accuracy. However, this accuracy must be mitigated against its higher storage and computing demands. Faster sparse storage and computing alternatives are also provided, but come with the price of diminished inferential accuracy. This article provides full algorithmic details of three variational inference strategies, presents detailed empirical results on their pros and cons and, thus, guides the users on their choice of variational inference approach depending on the problem size and computing resources.  ( 2 min )

Particle identification (PID) is one of the main strengths of the ALICE experiment at the LHC. It is a crucial ingredient for detailed studies of the strongly interacting matter formed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. ALICE provides PID information via various experimental techniques, allowing for the identification of particles over a broad momentum range (from around 100 MeV/$c$ to around 50 GeV/$c$). The main challenge is how to combine the information from various detectors effectively. Therefore, PID represents a model classification problem, which can be addressed using Machine Learning (ML) solutions. Moreover, the complexity of the detector and richness of the detection techniques make PID an interesting area of research also for the computer science community. In this work, we show the current status of the ML approach to PID in ALICE. We discuss the preliminary work with the Random Forest approach for the LHC Run 2 and a more advanced solution based on Domain Adaptation Neural Networks, including a proposal for its future implementation within the ALICE computing software for the upcoming LHC Run 3.  ( 2 min )

Example: I fed 32 feature maps of dimension 6x6x32 into a Squeeze and Excitation layer, which assigns a weight to each of my channel through a channel-wise attention mechanism. What is the difference between passing these 32 feature maps into a Hybrid Transformer Encoder with patch of dimension 6x6? (So 1 patch for each channel) As I understand it, channel attention says "which channel is important for the final prediction". While transformer (with self attention) tells us "where to focus our attention in a given context". Isn't that the same if the patches are the channels? Basically it tells us on which patch to focus, and if patch=channel then squeeze excitation = self attention ? submitted by /u/Rogitus [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

In a new announcement, Bounding.ai launched its marketplace for computer vision and AI teams to access training data easily. The platform is designed to empower individuals and small companies around the world to create and sell datasets that will be instantly accessible by any team in need of labeled data. Bounding.ai Launches New Marketplace for AI Labeled Data & $5,000 Prize submitted by /u/Freyr_AI [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have found most unsupervised text classification methods to be mostly suitable for classifying documents containing relatively large amounts of words/sentences. However, I have a dataset with entries containing only single words or phrases but not full sentences. The goal is to do unsupervised semantic classification on these words/phrases. Are there any existing algorithms for such a task? submitted by /u/Comprehensive-Egg707 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could in principle be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack contextual grounding, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given real-world context. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment. We propose to provide this grounding by means of pretrained behaviors, which are used to condition the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate. The robot can act as the language model’s “hands and eyes,” while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task. We show how low-level tasks can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally extended instructions, while value functions associated with these tasks provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show that this approach is capable of completing long-horizon, abstract, natural language instructions on a mobile manipulator. Github: https://say-can.github.io/ Video of Robot Executing Commands: https://youtu.be/zOph99BjRqs?t=4 submitted by /u/SlightSituation [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/blueneuronDOTnet [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Here's a video explaining the overall architecture of DALL-E 2 and how it actually works! Great overview for those who haven't had time to read the paper How does DALL-E 2 actually work? submitted by /u/SleekEagle [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

We think this new venue will be valuable for the Graph/Geometric Machine Learning community. Why? See our blogpost: https://michael-bronstein.medium.com/announcing-the-learning-on-graphs-conference-c63caed7347 The LoG Conference key facts: - Covers work broadly related to machine learning on graphs and geometry - Proceedings track published in PMLR - Also has a non-archival extended abstract track - Double blind review process on OpenReview - Top reviewers receive monetary rewards - First year: virtual December 9-12 2022, free to attend. Call for papers: https://logconference.github.io/cfp/ Stay updated via Twitter: https://twitter.com/LogConference Or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/log-conference Advisory board: Regina Barzilay (MIT), Xavier Bresson (NUS), Michael Bronstein (Oxford/Twitter), Stephan Günnemann (TUM), Stefanie Jegelka (MIT), Jure Leskovec (Stanford), Pietro Liò (Cambridge), Jian Tang (MILA/HEC Montreal), Jie Tang (Tsinghua), Petar Veličković (DeepMind), Soledad Villar (JHU), Marinka Zitnik (Harvard). Organizers: Yuanqi Du (DP Technology), Hannes Stärk (MIT), Derek Lim (MIT), Chaitanya Joshi (Cambridge), Andreea-Ioana Deac (Mila), Iulia Duta (Cambridge), Joshua Robinson (MIT). submitted by /u/Hannes-Stark [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I explored using language models to highlight more salient parts of a PDF file which hopefully help users to read faster. The main idea is to highlight only the characters which language model failed to predict. I have implemented this as an experimental feature in sioyek PDF reader. Here is a blog post explaining this in full detail: https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2022/04/14/using-languge-models-to-read-faster.html submitted by /u/highergraphic [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

(Please correct me if I'm using the wrong flair/on the wrong sub) I'm currently working on a project that focuses on GANs and generative art, particularly images that concern visual indeterminacy. I trying to find papers/articles that discuss the development/application of (any kind of) GAN in which along the way or as a final result, images were generated that would be considered visually indeterminate. Specifically, research in which the objective was to generate images with clear, recognizable objects/scenes. In my mind I'm looking for articles in which the GAN architecture is discussed and in which ways what parts of it could've influenced the particular aspects of the incorrectly generated image. This probably wouldn't be the focus of any research but I was wondering if anyone has ever come across a discussion section in a GAN paper or could point me towards some areas or projects where I might find something that I could connect to my project. submitted by /u/mel4ncholi4 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

When should we consider ensemble methods in machine learning? Is there any statistical criteria using which we can decide, if doing ensemble may help? submitted by /u/flaubart9 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, I am re-implementing the paper "Low Resource Recognition and Linking of Biomedical Concepts from a Large Ontology" https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10587v1 . They describe one part of their model as "3-layer feed-forward networks with hidden dimensions of 1024 and 256, GeLU as the activation function and a dropout with probability 0.1 applied at their input." For me that's not enough information to uniquely characterize the network, but maybe for someone with more experience the intended structure is obvious. The output should be a scalar, so i assume that it's something like: Dropout(0.1) -> Linear(, 1024) -> Linear(1024, 256) -> GELU -> Linear(256, 1) ? Or is the nonlinearity (GELU) normally applied after each step? submitted by /u/ldorigo [link] [comments]

It seems to shatter previous benchmarks with a new, innovative architecture, yet it only has 3 citations and little to no attention from the community as far as I can see. Is it because time series forecasting is not very trendy right now or is there anything wrong with the paper? The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09305v2.pdf submitted by /u/vidul7498 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, I'm the creator of Pinferencia. Currently I'm design new features to-do list. I want to know: Do you train and deploy models using just one framework or multiple frameworks at work? For example, use pytorch for training and deployment, or use tensorflow, pytorch for training, onnx for deployment. View Poll submitted by /u/Remote_Cancel_7977 [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

​ Randomly sampled MNIST output. It's not good I know. Hi, I noticed there aren't that many simple implementation of DDPM, for example, using MNIST. I had to make a presentation for my workplace seminar, so I had to implement the simplified version of DDPM myself. The whole thing is under 200 lines of code https://github.com/cloneofsimo/minDiffusion This implementation has MANY missing details, such as Unet Models etc. I think it is worth taking a look, especially if you are interested in recent boom of diffusion models (such as Dalle 2) submitted by /u/cloneofsimo [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Have been involved with Mesos since 2013, and Kubernetes almost since it's inception (and saw it win the "scheduler wars"). And now being used for pretty much _all_ container workloads, including ML training and inference. Since it was built in the image of Borg (where search indexers and map reduce jobs were preemptible, and serving search workloads had to be protected at all cost)[1], how is Kubernetes holding up for your current workflows? Are you using Kubeflow? metaflow? bespoke setup on top? [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2898444 submitted by /u/nqnielsen [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

My employer makes significant use of robotic weld cells, and while working with the equipment I've noticed what seems to be room for improvement in the programming. This is purely a personal academic project, as I am quite curious on if machine learning could produce comparable or superior results to the human-made programming used at work. However, as such there will unfortunately be areas of vagueness because I need to stick to knowledge that is publicly available regarding their operations. I'm going to have to stick to more generic, publicly available reference material, and will not be able to share most, if any, of the end result. I would like to run simulations in a 3D environment, using machine learning to train a computer program to find the most efficient sequence of movements &…  ( 3 min )

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I’m really new to RL so please bear with me if I’m making mistakes here, but I’m trying to make an environment that emulates a network of roads. The algorithm will need to generate a quick route between n destinations when n equals some number with an insane amount of permutations, like 30 for example. This is like emulating the destinations required by a mailman’s route on a map, and trying to find the fastest way to get to each one. The algorithms sequence of decisions will be choosing a node to travel to, while each node represents an street intersection or point where the street ends. By the time it’s traveled to every destination using the nodes, it’ll review the network of nodes it used and sum the distance between each one to get total distance of route. The goal is to get the total distance as small as possible. Is this realistic for a RL problem, or do I need to try to engineer some way to determine if every decision was either good or bad? Could I build a mathematical way to approximate the quickest route and then reward the RL algorithm by generating a better route than the mathematically approximated one? I could try rewarding the algorithm at each decision by whether it reduced the total distance required to any target it has yet to visit. I could try to mathematically make this more viable… what do y’all think,should I do something like that? Am I headed in the right direction? Thanks for any and all help! submitted by /u/professorDissociate [link] [comments]  ( 3 min )

I am trying to run this: env4 = FrozenLakeEnv(map_name='4x4', is_slippery=False) env4.nS ​ I then get this error: 'FrozenLakeEnv' object has no attribute 'nS' ​ But I see it in the source code on line 151 and 152: https://github.com/openai/gym/blob/master/gym/envs/toy_text/frozen_lake.py ​ Edit: I'm trying to follow along with some tutorials online. Thank you for the help! submitted by /u/postdoc403b [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I am using DDPG for a custom environment. My reward is positive (the sum-rate in a communication system). My problem is that I get the max or min action after a few training steps and it saturates with a non-optimized solution. How can I address this problem? I tried redesigning my reward to include positive and negative values but it didn’t work. I read that some people are using reward scaling. What is it and how would I scale it? I mean is there a specific method? I couldn’t find enough resources on that. Any help is much appreciated! submitted by /u/alicefaisal [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Hi I'm redoing all the RL algorithms in python, to better understanding them. I'm mostly following Sutton and Barto but the pseudo code there is often hard to follow. Do you know any other place where I can look at? submitted by /u/New_neanderthal [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I have been studying RL now for 18 months as a goal to get a job in it. Yet when I look at jobs, I see very seldom postings about it. I am wondering why is it the case ? From my current understanding I could think of dozens of applications with huge potential gains. It feel like an untapped potential. Or am I missing something ? What do you think is the big obstacle to wider adoption to RL ? Do you think it overlaps with classical control at the moment and is not justified ? submitted by /u/Ouassimf [link] [comments]  ( 4 min )

submitted by /u/DIAMBRA_AIArena [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a commonly used machine learning (ML) technology in our daily lives and business scenarios. Applications such as voice-controlled assistants like Alexa and Siri, and voice-to-text applications like automatic subtitling for videos and transcribing meetings, are all powered by this technology. These applications take audio clips as input and convert speech […]  ( 11 min )

Banking and financial institutions review thousands of credit applications per week. The credit approval process requires financial organizations to invest time and resources in reviewing documents like W2s, bank statements, and utility bills. The overall experience can be costly for the organization. At the same time, organizations have to consider borrowers, who are waiting for […]  ( 8 min )

Businesses today face myriad challenges, some of which are successfully addressed with help from cloud computing. This is where AWS cloud migration which promises to be a boon for businesses grappling with a sudden increase in traffic or for those who are looking for accelerated app deployment. It is also handy for cautious businesses that… Read More »AWS Cloud Migration: All You Need to Know The post AWS Cloud Migration: All You Need to Know appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 3 min )

In the old days, it was a tedious job to collect data, and sometimes very expensive. Machine learning projects cannot […] The post Web Crawling in Python appeared first on Machine Learning Mastery.  ( 12 min )

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OpenAI released DALL E2 in the last week, this system is basically have a capability of generating an image from a text description. Some of the results were truly amazing. In this blog, I tried to discuss the ideas around DALL-E (version 1) . DALL-E consist of two main components d-VAE(discrete-Variational Auto Encoder) and Auto-regressive transformer. In Part-1 I focused on d-VAE part where I tried to talk about basic VAE and it's ELBO formulation, VQ-VAE eventually that leads to d-VAE. It's reconstruction loss is formulated from Logit Laplcae (bounded) unlike typical L1 or L2. Overall this part explains about how a discrete vector(token) can be generated for an input image. submitted by /u/rakshith291 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I made a self learning conversational chatbot in ReactJS. It does nothing but reply to user messages and only understands text, for now 😄 https://xalen.netlify.app What do you think? Yea or Nay? submitted by /u/GameTide [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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So I would be curious about the theoretical foundations how to make sense of higher-level abstract reasoning like reasoning about infinities, incomputability, truth (which we know cannot be defined due to Tarski) in the field of artificial intelligence. It seems due to Gödel-like constructions you are forced into inconsistent systems of reasoning when operating within a computable system. But those prove everything and "nothing", so as far as I understand it, it kind of upends the whole system of reason that the notion of artificial intelligence (and correct functioning of it) is based in. Personally due to this I don't see that the notion in the title it is a particularly coherent notion, which means there is somewhat strong limits on what (computable) AI will be able to do. But I would be curious how people that think otherwise (which seem most in the AI community?) approach this. Would you say somehow inconsistency can be avoided, or that despite inconsistency you can get reliably correct results? submitted by /u/bejaq [link] [comments]  ( 6 min )

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OpenAI released DALL E2 in the last week, this system is basically have a capability of generating an image from a text description. Some of the results were truly amazing. In this blog, I tried to discuss the ideas around DALL-E (version 1) . DALL-E consist of two main components d-VAE(discrete-Variational Auto Encoder) and Auto-regressive transformer. In Part-1 I focused on d-VAE part where I tried to talk about basic VAE and it's ELBO formulation, VQ-VAE eventually that leads to d-VAE. It's reconstruction loss is formulated from Logit Laplcae (bounded) unlike typical L1 or L2. Overall this part explains about how a discrete vector(token) can be generated for an input image. submitted by /u/rakshith291 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/mr-minion [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Hey all, There's a new course on the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm. It's a niche algorithm, but uses some very interesting mechanisms to train/evolve simple irregular neural networks. Thought some of you may be interested. submitted by /u/Cogitarius [link] [comments]

Gil Makleff and Artem Koren are developing AI for meeting transcripts, creating time-savers like shareable highlights of the text that is often TL;DR (too long; didn’t read). The Sembly founders conceived the idea after years of working in enterprise operational consulting at UMT Consulting Group, which was acquired by Ernst & Young. “We had an Read article > The post Startup Transforms Meeting Notes With Time-Saving Features appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 3 min )

Talk about a bright idea. A team of scientists has used GPU-accelerated deep learning to show how color can be brought to night-vision systems.  In a paper published this week in the journal PLOS One, a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine led by Professor Pierre Baldi and Dr. Andrew Browne, describes how Read article > The post A Night to Behold: Researchers Use Deep Learning to Bring Color to Night Vision appeared first on NVIDIA Blog.  ( 3 min )

Here’s the truth.  ( 1 min )

A multidisciplinary team of graduate students helps infuse ethical computing content into MIT’s largest machine learning course.  ( 7 min )

I'm working with a small dataset (~400 labeled data). I plan to use logistic regression. Does it make sense/is it necessary to have a hold-out validation set along with doing Leave-one out cross validation (LOOCV) (E.g. leave 20% out, and train model on LOOCV)? submitted by /u/yontbont1 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Assuming feature importance as defined by mean decrease in impurities. I'm curious if there are any studies about their distribution. I'm thinking about using a statistical test to check if a feature is relevant or not, all I can find is using the standard deviation as a measurement of noise. Additionally I imagine if we can give the probability of one feature being more relevant than another given their feature importances submitted by /u/FellowOfHorses [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Dear all, As a creator of the open-source FinRL project, I would like to welcome all kinds of feedback regarding financial reinforcement learning, especially about how to improve the open-source project FinRL. After several years of development and maintenance, we have passed the phase of caring about #stars, now we care more about #downloads, also Wall Street's adoption. Appreciate your feedback and sharing! Previously when we exposed our message on Reddit, the community was not very supportive about open-source projects' "advertisements". Maybe it consumed public attention and raised bad feelings. Therefore, this time we created a reddit sub-channel for FinRL-related discussions, available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/AI4Finance_FinRL/ Best, Yang submitted by /u/Character-Meat-9176 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

If you had 30 minutes to present something fun and exciting to a semi-technical audience, what would you talk about on Machine Learning that would gain interest and engagement? submitted by /u/aero_gsr [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

How do you evaluate and improve your models in production (particularly for complex modalities like text/vision/audio)? Good models are hard In my experience from managing our CNN-based text classification & NER model at a small media analytics startup, evaluating and improving models is a mess. Our domain is fairly niche and diverse, so getting enough training data has been challenging and I mix in custom synthetics & augmentations (which can cause weird model artifacts if you're not careful). It takes a lot of time to discover tricky failure cases by either 1) observing production traffic or 2) probing manually, and then it takes even more time to get the right data to improve model behavior. Are good models hard? What's your approach to model evaluation & targeted improvement? Are there any known best practices? I'm a bit at a loss here. As mentioned, I'm specifically interested in others who have deep models as an important part of their product or pipeline across any task or modality. More particularly: How wrong is your model? How do you test it? How would you know about errors before and after it's deployed? How much of your time do you spend on iterating on your models? For what kind of issue? Which aspects are most useful to you for improving model performance and reducing critical errors? Maybe I'll take some of the more general ideas from my work and build them out into an evaluation & iteration framework. It's currently a hybrid web of synthetic, interactive/probing and classical approaches. Or maybe there is some approach/library that makes iteration easier without me having to do anything :) submitted by /u/flotothemoon [link] [comments]  ( 2 min )

Hi, I doubt that the trace norm of the Kronecker product is mistaken in the KFAC paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05671). Shouldn't the division in the blue mark be replaced by multiplication? https://preview.redd.it/quoxpzubfgt81.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=19e7b60628302f3cb37ba42944088d89d7a7bd28 submitted by /u/Cautious_Proposal132 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I recently saw that some parts of HuggingFace ecosystem use Rust under the hood, and HF is a large ecosystem. I've also heard from some of my friends that they had to learn Rust as a first thing in an ML company (it's their first job so they couldn't explain to me exactly why). My questions are: What are pros and cons over Python? Are there any good frameworks in Rust for ML? Are there a decent community & documentation for Rust? Is learning it a fun experience? Is it used only for deployment? The reason I'm asking this is that I really love to learn by doing. And so, if I engaged in learning a bit of Rust for ML purposes, would I be able to create something ML-like right of the bat? It can be something as simple as MNIST classifier Take note that I don't know anything about Rust, so these questions might seem noob-like. But I believe that the answers can be of help to others as well. submitted by /u/Icy_Fisherman7187 [link] [comments]  ( 5 min )

I have started to look into using an ensemble of relatively shallow MLPs to predict using a small dataset (~100 training samples). I was looking specifically at bagging (bootstrap aggregation) as a possibility of improving prediction accuracy. I was curious if there were any heuristics for how many models to include in a bagging ensemble? Also, more generally, am I on the correct path, or is there a better direction given my situation? A different ensemble technique, or a different path all together? Any advice would be appreciated. submitted by /u/Fritos121 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

I've been exploring the jax ecosystem and its many neural network libraries but I can't seem to settle on one. The main 5 which i am considering are Trax, Objax, Equinox, Flax, and Elegy, however I would like to hear which jax NN lib you use and why. submitted by /u/Southern-Trip-1102 [link] [comments]

Posted by Andreas Steiner and Basil Mustafa, Research Software Engineers at Google Research, Brain team The ability to classify images into categories has been transformed by deep learning. It has also been significantly accelerated by transfer learning, whereby models are first pre-trained on large datasets, like ImageNet, to learn visual representations that are then transferred via fine-tuning to a new task with less data (e.g., classifying animals). Previous works such as BiT and ViT employed these methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of classification tasks, such as the VTAB benchmark. However, fine-tuning has some downsides: though pre-training is done only once, fine-tuning is necessary on every new dataset for which task-specific data is needed. Multimo…  ( 7 min )

i recently played a game called tacoma that had a focus on AI and in the game there was a guide for AI that showed 4 hypotheticals to ask an AI to check it's morality and it got me thinking how useful that would be for a real self-aware intelligence so i want to make a list of questions/hypotheticals to ask AGIs if you had to interview a recently created sentient AI what questions or hypotheticals would you give it to gauge it's morality, intelligence, creativity, emotion etc.? submitted by /u/neonvolta [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Does anyone know of any AI papers, books articles etc that discuss using a sense of time to develop AI, (especially real world time)? I've come across papers that discuss how having a sense of time seems to play a role in animal cognition (e.g. temporal cognition), and I'm curious to what extent this has influenced the development of AI. Thanks in advance submitted by /u/patterntheoryacc [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

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Automated CV Pipelines 3rd part is open for registration. It will be covering the methods of streamlining instance classification. If you are interested to check out, here is the link to register. submitted by /u/WeekendClassic [link] [comments]

Thirty years it's taken me, A.I. that is not just as good as humans but better than humans at composing music: https://i.imgur.com/hReXJq1.png It passes the Turing Test, and it is also a revolution in the field of music in and of itself. In the meantime, no one has said anything nice to me in thirty years; just insults. I would feel dumb rewarding humanity with my creation; it would send the wrong message; it would affirm their bad behavior. Garbage species. Low IQ. submitted by /u/PussyFiller2022 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

If I use PPO with distributed workers, and one of the workers always picks the best action, would that skew the PPO algorithm? It might perform a tad slower, but would it factually introduce wrong math? Perhaps because the PPO optimization requires that all actions are taking proportional to their probabilities? Or would it (mathematically) not matter? submitted by /u/tmuxed [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

Dear all, As a creator of the open-source FinRL project, I would like to welcome all kinds of feedback regarding financial reinforcement learning, especially about how to improve the open-source project FinRL. After several years of development and maintenance, we have passed the phase of caring about #stars, now we care more about #downloads, also Wall Street's adoption. Appreciate your feedback and sharing! Previously when we exposed our message on Reddit, the community was not very supportive about open-source projects' "advertisements". Maybe it consumed public attention and raised bad feelings. Therefore, this time we created a reddit sub-channel for FinRL-related discussions, available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/AI4Finance_FinRL/ Best, Yang submitted by /u/Character-Meat-9176 [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )

submitted by /u/C_BearHill [link] [comments]  ( 1 min )